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bronze_ribbonsTitle: Just Like Strangers Here (part 1 of 2)
By: bronze_ribbons
For: ymfaery and sor_bet
Words: this chapter ~ 4000
Summary: Severus Snape had never wanted to live in Japan, or to miss Remus Lupin.
Disclaimer: No malice intended, no profit expected.
Warning: References to domestic violence and character deaths.
Rating: PG
Betas:![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
aunty_marion and busaikko
Originally posted to LJ:lupin_snape for Fantasy Fest April 2006.
Ymfaery's prompt: "Post-War. S had fled UK to live in ancestral non-English speaking home country w/o knowing AD left behind findable evidence of S acting under orders. R finds him some unspecified time later--how/why up to author. Asian home country a plus. Smut optional."
Prequel: Stoppered
Severus Snape had never wanted to live in Japan. Nonetheless, during the latter half of his tenure at Hogwarts, he secretly deposited portions of his paycheques into the vaults of Tokyo's Tamonten Bank as a precautionary measure. An account had been set up for him there when he inherited a stipend from Rin Oyanagi, a Japanese matron who had helped her sister elope with an English wizard whose surname was "Prince."
The couple had subsequently christened their elder daughter "Eileen" in her honour, anglicising a variant of her name, but Snape was not an official relative of his great-aunt O-Rin: the bride’s family had been as horrified by the match as the groom’s, and they had proved to be equally ruthless in pruning their family tree of branches contaminated by unsuitable pollen. As far as his ancestral clans were concerned, Severus Snape simply did not exist.
His grandmother had understood she would never return to Japan, and she had accordingly attempted to raise her children in as English a fashion as she knew how. But her knowledge of local customs had been gleaned primarily from literary fiction and women's periodicals, resulting in repeat collisions of good intentions and bad judgment. This had affected matters as fundamental as her daughters' wardrobes: although Wizarding couture encompassed a staggering array of styles -- including many abandoned by Muggles decades or even centuries before -- it also cherished a host of unwritten, arbitrary rules that Mrs. Prince had failed to apprehend and thus cheerfully disregarded. Eileen and her sister, however, had been fully cognisant of the snide whispers and mock compliments inspired by their not-quite-appropriate garb at every event they'd attended, be it a birthday party, Quidditch outing, or picnic. A slightly too-cheap accessory, a too-wide hem, an off-colour hairband, or some other subtle misstep -- all these things offered grist for the other girls' vicious millings about. Eileen and her sister were aware that other mothers had occasionally attempted to intercede on their behalf, hinting that young, plain witches needed to adhere more closely to the strictures of contemporary conventional Wizarding fashion than those with the advantages of age or beauty, but to no avail.
Eileen's father was of no help, having reverted to type after his marriage. Gentleman wizards of his class were not obliged to be interested in their children. Of their collective accomplishments, the only ones that had mattered to him were those of his son. He'd found his daughters to be as perplexing and peculiar as all of his other female relatives, and he'd regarded his wife’s airs and affectations as endearing rather than maddening . Thus, he had been baffled by his daughters’ resistance to their mother’s whims and decrees, and interpreted it not as simple self-preservation but as merely a mysterious condition of girlhood. In short, he'd neither understood it nor considered it his problem.
Left to her own devices, and believing it her duty to advance her children’s academic prospects by every means possible, Mrs. Prince had bombarded Eileen's teachers with persistent, obsessively detailed notes that had been routinely dissected at the Hogwarts faculty teas, her imperfect English and her unreasonable requests providing ample fodder for mockery. Some of the more compassionate professors had found the missives edifying as well, realising just why young Eileen was so arrogant, awkward, and driven. They'd pitied her, but it was neither their responsibility nor their right to save her from her mother’s ambitions or her father’s indifference.
When her brother perished in an accident during her seventh year at Hogwarts, Eileen had guiltily but desperately hoped her father might finally divert some affection toward his remaining children. It hadn't happened, and her mother had become even more impossible, incessantly badgering Eileen to quit playing Gobstones ("too dangerous!") and revoking the permission she’d given for Eileen to visit Hogsmeade ("too many bad people out there!"). By then, however, Eileen had become adept at evading her mother’s interference, having accumulated an impressive arsenal of charms, counter-spells, and disingenuous verbal manipulations in the course of surviving life in Slytherin.
It hadn’t hurt that her mother’s command of European magic was limited to basic housekeeping, and that so many useful spells required the caster to pronounce the letter "l" correctly, which her mother had never mastered. As other Japanese transplants to Britain had discovered, her mother found her native magic unreliable in her adopted country: there was something within the isles that weakened or neutralised most Sino-Altaic incantations. Decades later, Eileen’s son would observe the same to be true for Latin-based spells spoken on the island of Honshu -- the main island of Japan -- to which he retired after the death of Draco Malfoy.
* * *
Severus Snape’s memories of his grandparents and aunt were few -- a scattering of faint impressions from his early childhood. After her marriage to Tobias Snape, Eileen had minimized contact with her family, wanting to live her own life on her own terms in her own corner of northern England. The city had been too crowded and too Muggle for her parents or sister to indulge in casual visits, which had complemented Eileen’s desire to keep her neighbours ignorant of both the Japanese and Wizarding aspects of her heritage. She cut off relations with her parents altogether after her mother’s thoughtlessly disparaging remarks about Severus's nose, and she ceased speaking to her sister after one too many queries about the contusions and scrapes she didn't want to explain.
From his mother, Severus Snape learned how to analyze spells and reconfigure them as needed. From his mother, Snape learned to hold conventional wisdom in contempt. Thanks to his mother, Snape understood that keeping his classmates ignorant of his background was an act of pre-emptive self-defence. Thanks to his mother, Snape arrived at Hogwarts thoroughly versed in wordless Japanese hexes that did work in Scotland. Not recognising the spells, almost all the other children readily assumed he was a devotee of Dark magic; the only one with the wit and fearlessness to ask him about actual details was Remus Lupin.
The two boys kept their association secret from the very beginning: Snape’s housemates would have disapproved of Lupin, who was half-Muggle, a quarter French, openly bookish, and completely lacking in style as well as pedigree. Lupin’s closest friends despised Snape for being a swot and a tattletale, and Lupin kept quiet about the fact that he looked forward to James and Sirius’s many detentions as much as Snape did.
When they managed to steal time together, Snape and Lupin didn’t waste it discussing their friends or their families. Instead, the two boys concentrated on more pleasant puzzles: the volatility of certain plant hybrids, the intersections of seemingly contradictory theories, and the intricate construction of assorted artefacts. It being understood that they would share nothing of their sessions together with anyone else, Snape taught Lupin his hexes, although he chose not to disclose how he had learned them or even that they were Japanese in origin. For his part, Lupin seemed equally reluctant to discuss his own childhood or how he had attained his extraordinary familiarity with painkilling remedies -- a range of knowledge that included Dark potions and Muggle pills as well as traditional Wizarding compounds.
Like Snape, Lupin was not as naturally gifted as James Potter or Sirius Black, but he possessed a patience his more charismatic companions lacked. Whereas Potter and Black were interested exclusively in results, Lupin actually enjoyed immersing himself in the analysis of techniques and procedures. When he was alone with Lupin, Snape felt free of the defensiveness that dogged his interactions with his parents, his teachers, and his other peers -- he could trust Lupin not to ridicule his in-depth rereadings of Schillermarbach’s treatises on Occlumency, and he could respect Lupin’s fascination with goblin metalcrafting. Around Lupin, Snape could forget that he was mediocre at games and hopeless around girls; Lupin exhibited neither prowess nor interest in either arena. Snape did resent how, unlike other sensitive, hormonally undemonstrative boys, Lupin was seldom taunted as a "nancy-boy" and "poof," thanks to his status as a comrade of Potter and Black. Snape also fantasised, however, about cosily comfortable evenings in faraway libraries, and of other not-yet-speakable possibilities beyond the walls of Hogwarts.
But when Snape discovered that Lupin was a werewolf, he concluded he had been the butt of a cosmic joke: of course Lupin was willing to spend time with him, because Lupin was more of a freak than he himself would ever be -- and yet it was Lupin who ran with James Potter’s pack, and Lupin who was a prefect, and Lupin who somehow managed to blend in just enough with the crowds to avoid raising their suspicions. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair, and Snape could bear it no longer: four days after his encounter with Lupin the werewolf, Severus Snape entered the Room of Requirement, jabbed his wand against his temple, and extracted from his mind every shred of admiration and affection he had harboured for Remus Lupin, pulverising the memories into a toxic potion that he decanted into a small silver flask.
He promised himself he would someday deliver its contents to Remus Lupin: he wanted to show Lupin what it meant to be consumed alive. He clung to his loathing throughout Lupin’s tenure as the Hogwarts DADA instructor, periodically setting the flask on his desk and contemplating whether to incorporate it into the next batch of Wolfsbane, but ultimately forcing himself to wait. It would have been the height of self-indulgence to destroy Lupin before he took full advantage of the man’s foolish attachment to Sirius Black.
The day after Lupin departed from Hogwarts, Snape hurled the flask against the wall of his office. It clanged on the stone, the sound reminding him of an ancient fencing manual he had once pored over in Lupin’s company. Snape berated himself for forgetting that he was the joke. The Order of Merlin would never be his, and he would never be the Headmaster’s favourite, no matter how competently and thoroughly he discharged his duties. The humiliation of his thwarted capture of Black should have qualified as his new worst memory, but he saw it merely as a coda to the earlier ones: he would never again let himself imagine that the universe was formulated upon any semblance of fairness or grace.
It was a lesson he did his best to impart to his students and to the rest of the Order: the sooner they stopped expecting the world to be just and kind, the better equipped they would be to save it. He seized every opportunity to belittle young Potter (You may be "special," but as long as I can have any say about it, you can bloody well pay the same dues as the rest of us) and snarled past the dryness in his throat whenever he observed Granger’s obsessive overcompensation for her gawky appearance and non-Wizard pedigree. He refused to acknowledge the satisfaction he felt whenever she managed to retain her composure; in a similar vein, he insisted on regarding his research on palliative potions as occasional rather than ongoing, even though the subject somehow hijacked his attention every time the moon waxed gibbous. Nor did he dwell on his penchant for thin men with greying hair and hoarse voices during his rare one-night stands in London and Glasgow.
He continued to conceal his Japanese ancestry, rooting against the Toyahashi Tengu with particular vehemence and insisting that kappas were Mongolian. His grandparents, parents, and aunt had all passed away during Voldemort’s first reign of terror, and most of the teachers his grandmother had harassed were also gone; the ones still active had outlasted so many difficult parents since Mrs. Prince that she had long since faded from their memories. Although Snape hoped he wouldn't have to resort to hiding in Asia, he nevertheless retained a Swiss broker to manage his Tamonten account and covertly memorised the geography of Tokyo, all the while intimating to his colleagues that his heart’s desire was to retire to Denmark or Transylvania.
Years later, when he read about the Ministry’s manhunts in Copenhagen and Cluj-Napoca, Snape mentally awarded himself ten points for correctly anticipating his pursuers' moves. Upon the demise of the Dark Lord, his first relocation had been to the east coast of the United States: Draco Malfoy was still his problem, and he had realised that managing a spoiled teenager in a non-English speaking country would be beyond his powers. That said, metropolitan Boston still offered plenty of trouble for bored adolescents to seek out, and once the brat ran afoul of the wrong thugs in Dorchester, not even Albus could have saved him.
Alone, Snape subsequently proceeded to zigzag around the Americas, partaking of community education courses in Japanese language and culture while planting false clues to steer anyone overly interested in his whereabouts back towards Europe. He was still unenthused about immigrating to Tokyo, but its environs offered him his best odds of retaining his liberty: it was all but impossible for a European wizard to perform magic in Japan without being conspicuous, but this also deterred both would-be expatriates and those on their trail from viewing Japan as a plausible destination. There being very little interaction between the Japanese and British Ministries of Magic, Snape could reasonably expect to remain at large -- provided he drew no attention to himself as a wizard. In other words, provided he ceased practicing magic.
He took no joy in the prospect of living exclusively as a Muggle, but he knew he was capable of doing so. According to the travel guides and Sunday newsmagazines he'd consulted, bewildered tourists and underprepared teachers of English were not a novelty in urban Japan. Snape would have balked at returning to classroom teaching under most circumstances, and to do so for one of the popular mega-schools was out of the question. Their employees were expected to function not only as language tutors, but also as genial ambassadors of English-speaking goodwill, and Snape felt he would rather herd nekomatas than subject himself indefinitely to yet another unsuitable role.
Instead, he set about crafting his new identity as a research analyst -- one senior enough at his firm to be entrusted with work complex enough to mandate an extended overseas residency. He acquired a license for the company in question, "_______ and Associates," filling in the blank with a name so bland and so common that anyone wishing to authenticate his employer's existence would be required to sift through the listings of the six engineering consultancies, ten law firms, consortium of publishers' representatives, and dozens of insurance agencies all doing business under that same name. Snape thought it unlikely that casual investigators would subject themselves to that degree of bother; in fact, he was counting on most of them mistaking one of the other companies for his own.
Nevertheless, he also invested considerable effort in fabricating his professional portfolio, as it was crucial that he be able to supply passable verification to anyone insistent on checking his papers or his references. He purchased impeccably forged credentials -- and privately confirmed that the relevant registrars' databases had been appropriately and comprehensively modified. He sent himself contract assignments from a number of imaginary customers, the better to create paper and electronic trails to support his pseudo-history of "recent projects completed." He intermixed them with a handful of short-term tasks he completed for actual clients; in doing so, he discovered that he could dodge most inquiries about his work with the splendid phrase "confidentiality agreement." As he travelled around the southeastern United States, stitching into place his multiple strands of identities and histories and alibis, Snape found it surprisingly easy to pass as a native of Boston: his questionable driving skills and his impatience with meandering small talk were apparently par for the course among transplants from New England, and his unattractive looks stood him in good stead: his classmates and other acquaintances asked him only superficial questions about his life, preferring to flirt and network with more handsome prospects.
He Apparated back to Massachusetts once a week, both to accrue more first-hand details for his fictional background and to visit the Wizarding reading room in Boston's North End. It was usually a brief stop -- just long enough to skim the most recent papers -- but the Prophet's report on Charles Weasley's sentencing gave him pause. Snape's fingers itched for one of his grading quills -- the article was a classic example of the newspaper's overly wordy yet underinformative fare, offering few salient details about Weasley's crime. However, this much was clear: the chief witness for the prosecution had been Remus Lupin, and the photograph of the post-hearing crowd featured Molly Weasley attempting to scratch out Lupin's eyes.
Feeling suddenly unsteady, Snape took the paper to a carrel and sat down in front of it, forcing himself to review the image methodically and itemise the people in its centre: William and Fleur Weasley, restraining Molly. Arthur Weasley, looking defeated and bereft. Nymphadora Tonks -- not at Lupin's side but at Arthur's, as if lending the older man her support, and her hair as red as Ginevra's. Ginevra and Ronald, flanked by Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. The two youngest Weasleys were glaring at Lupin with undiluted hatred, whereas Potter's face reflected both anger and bewilderment, and Granger's countenance was suffused with sorrow. The entire crowd looked ready to hex Lupin into oblivion … and Lupin stood tall, his expression remote, his posture radiating both utter fearlessness and utter isolation.
Snape had occasionally glimpsed such a scene in his dreams, mentally giving it the caption of "The Mob and the Werewolf." Snape's imagination had featured a Lupin who pleaded with his friends -- sometimes for forgiveness, sometimes for his very life -- with the desperation and shamelessness of a cornered animal. In the photograph, however, Lupin carried himself with a calm and regal air, appearing wholly civilised -- wholly in control --in contrast to the sea of rage- and hysteria-afflicted people surrounding him.
Snape stared at Lupin's figure, his mind scrambling to reconcile his hyperawareness of the werewolf's failings with this manifestation of courage. He muttered a magnification charm that enlarged the photograph enough for Snape to study Lupin's eyes (what wouldn't I give right now to perform Legilimency…), and he recognised what he saw there: not humility. Not regret. Not compassion. Lupin's eyes burned with a terrible clarity -- that of a man who has knowingly sealed his own doom.
Snape sat very still for a long time. He was all too familiar with that look: it had greeted him from various mirrors over the past year.
* * *
During the weeks that followed, Snape's thoughts repeatedly returned to Lupin, his mind both revisiting the photograph and replaying their interactions over the years while he continued his preparations to shift to an all-Muggle lifestyle. He had been acquainted with non-magic-assisted chores as a child, of course, and it was neither rocket science nor a Dark Art to follow the instructions for operating microwave ovens and other appliances. To familiarise himself with common American assumptions and points of reference, he discreetly devoured children's books under the pretext of browsing for a nephew and skimmed guidebooks with words such as Quick, Everything, and Dummies in their titles. He used public library terminals to correspond with his Swiss money manager, arranging for the interest income from his savings to be transferred to a yubin chokin -- a type of Muggle interface through which his funds would be accessible from any post office in Japan, sparing him from having to visit Tamonten Bank in person. He practiced arithmetic with a variety of Japanese counting units until he was able to manipulate them fluently, calculating sums and percentages without first converting them into English, and he ratified his agent's selection of a seven-tatami apartment in the Akihabara district.
In the midst of all this, Snape tried to avoid thinking of the Room of Requirement and the silver flask he had returned to it prior to his final term at Hogwarts. Knowing he would almost certainly have to flee without warning, he had surreptitiously disposed of many non-essential possessions even before being appointed to the DADA professorship, and the flask of memory venom was a luxury he could ill-afford to have discovered in his possession. In the wake of his revived desire for Lupin -- an infatuation that had him scanning the reading room papers for any mention of the man, however minor -- a part of him longed to retrieve the flask, the better to restore his discarded memories to some semblance of their original state. Because he could not remember why Lupin had mattered so much to him, his mind insisted on plaguing him with sensual and romantic vignettes from the vestiges of his fantasies in lieu of the mundane actualities -- whatever they had been -- that he had once shared with Lupin.
He was startled to realise how glad he was Lupin had not been eaten alive, literally or figuratively, and he mentally thanked the gods for the ineptitude of both Greyback's minions and immature Aurors. Realistically, he understood it was unlikely he would ever see Lupin again, but he still drew a measure of satisfaction in knowing the man remained at liberty. He knew his feelings to be illogical, but he nevertheless felt less alone knowing that Lupin was likewise alone -- that Lupin fully knew what it meant to sacrifice friendship to justice. That Lupin had become a man worthy of respect -- perhaps even of being cherished: Snape's mind certainly seemed intent on dwelling upon him, entranced by his stance in the Prophet photograph.
He was therefore all the more shattered when he read Lupin's obituary in the Prophet two months later. Snape stared in disbelief at the report of an avalanche in the Pyrenees, and for a brief, horrible moment, he even wondered if Lupin had been following one of his false clues -- if he was somehow responsible for this death in addition to the others.
Then he ordered himself to retrieve his command of perspective: it was as egocentric to assume blame for all disasters as it was to insist on credit for every triumph. Snape carefully set the paper back into the reading room rack and stepped outside, ignoring the rain as he strode toward the Charlestown Bridge, hoping the physical activity would shake his wits back into place. There were few people outside in such weather, excepting a handful of dedicated joggers and a smattering of hapless tourists returning from the dock at which the USS Constitution was moored. None of them paid any heed to the others, and Snape considered this as much of a sign as any the universe was likely to spare for him: it was time.
He Apparated back to his rooms. Although he was determined to avoid using his wand for the foreseeable future, he could not stomach the thought of destroying it or casting it into the Charles. Instead, he held it briefly to his lips, and then inserted it through the left-hand loops of a battered MIT pennant. He wrapped the fabric around the wood before adding it to a pouch in which he'd also placed random coins, a souvenir deck of playing cards, a worn paperback copy of The Art of War, and a green-ribboned garter he'd confiscated from a student two years before -- a collection that would pass muster as the sentimental hoard of a bachelor, he hoped. He cushioned the pouch between two of the sweaters in his rolling suitcase, and inspected his papers once last time before zipping up his briefcase.
Snape closed his eyes, mentally bid farewell to America, and Apparated into a northern corner of Ueno Park. Opening his eyes, he silently bid farewell to magic and began to walk past the tents of the homeless.
Part 2
By: bronze_ribbons
For: ymfaery and sor_bet
Words: this chapter ~ 4000
Summary: Severus Snape had never wanted to live in Japan, or to miss Remus Lupin.
Disclaimer: No malice intended, no profit expected.
Warning: References to domestic violence and character deaths.
Rating: PG
Betas:
aunty_marion and busaikkoOriginally posted to LJ:lupin_snape for Fantasy Fest April 2006.
Ymfaery's prompt: "Post-War. S had fled UK to live in ancestral non-English speaking home country w/o knowing AD left behind findable evidence of S acting under orders. R finds him some unspecified time later--how/why up to author. Asian home country a plus. Smut optional."
Prequel: Stoppered
Severus Snape had never wanted to live in Japan. Nonetheless, during the latter half of his tenure at Hogwarts, he secretly deposited portions of his paycheques into the vaults of Tokyo's Tamonten Bank as a precautionary measure. An account had been set up for him there when he inherited a stipend from Rin Oyanagi, a Japanese matron who had helped her sister elope with an English wizard whose surname was "Prince."
The couple had subsequently christened their elder daughter "Eileen" in her honour, anglicising a variant of her name, but Snape was not an official relative of his great-aunt O-Rin: the bride’s family had been as horrified by the match as the groom’s, and they had proved to be equally ruthless in pruning their family tree of branches contaminated by unsuitable pollen. As far as his ancestral clans were concerned, Severus Snape simply did not exist.
His grandmother had understood she would never return to Japan, and she had accordingly attempted to raise her children in as English a fashion as she knew how. But her knowledge of local customs had been gleaned primarily from literary fiction and women's periodicals, resulting in repeat collisions of good intentions and bad judgment. This had affected matters as fundamental as her daughters' wardrobes: although Wizarding couture encompassed a staggering array of styles -- including many abandoned by Muggles decades or even centuries before -- it also cherished a host of unwritten, arbitrary rules that Mrs. Prince had failed to apprehend and thus cheerfully disregarded. Eileen and her sister, however, had been fully cognisant of the snide whispers and mock compliments inspired by their not-quite-appropriate garb at every event they'd attended, be it a birthday party, Quidditch outing, or picnic. A slightly too-cheap accessory, a too-wide hem, an off-colour hairband, or some other subtle misstep -- all these things offered grist for the other girls' vicious millings about. Eileen and her sister were aware that other mothers had occasionally attempted to intercede on their behalf, hinting that young, plain witches needed to adhere more closely to the strictures of contemporary conventional Wizarding fashion than those with the advantages of age or beauty, but to no avail.
Eileen's father was of no help, having reverted to type after his marriage. Gentleman wizards of his class were not obliged to be interested in their children. Of their collective accomplishments, the only ones that had mattered to him were those of his son. He'd found his daughters to be as perplexing and peculiar as all of his other female relatives, and he'd regarded his wife’s airs and affectations as endearing rather than maddening . Thus, he had been baffled by his daughters’ resistance to their mother’s whims and decrees, and interpreted it not as simple self-preservation but as merely a mysterious condition of girlhood. In short, he'd neither understood it nor considered it his problem.
Left to her own devices, and believing it her duty to advance her children’s academic prospects by every means possible, Mrs. Prince had bombarded Eileen's teachers with persistent, obsessively detailed notes that had been routinely dissected at the Hogwarts faculty teas, her imperfect English and her unreasonable requests providing ample fodder for mockery. Some of the more compassionate professors had found the missives edifying as well, realising just why young Eileen was so arrogant, awkward, and driven. They'd pitied her, but it was neither their responsibility nor their right to save her from her mother’s ambitions or her father’s indifference.
When her brother perished in an accident during her seventh year at Hogwarts, Eileen had guiltily but desperately hoped her father might finally divert some affection toward his remaining children. It hadn't happened, and her mother had become even more impossible, incessantly badgering Eileen to quit playing Gobstones ("too dangerous!") and revoking the permission she’d given for Eileen to visit Hogsmeade ("too many bad people out there!"). By then, however, Eileen had become adept at evading her mother’s interference, having accumulated an impressive arsenal of charms, counter-spells, and disingenuous verbal manipulations in the course of surviving life in Slytherin.
It hadn’t hurt that her mother’s command of European magic was limited to basic housekeeping, and that so many useful spells required the caster to pronounce the letter "l" correctly, which her mother had never mastered. As other Japanese transplants to Britain had discovered, her mother found her native magic unreliable in her adopted country: there was something within the isles that weakened or neutralised most Sino-Altaic incantations. Decades later, Eileen’s son would observe the same to be true for Latin-based spells spoken on the island of Honshu -- the main island of Japan -- to which he retired after the death of Draco Malfoy.
Severus Snape’s memories of his grandparents and aunt were few -- a scattering of faint impressions from his early childhood. After her marriage to Tobias Snape, Eileen had minimized contact with her family, wanting to live her own life on her own terms in her own corner of northern England. The city had been too crowded and too Muggle for her parents or sister to indulge in casual visits, which had complemented Eileen’s desire to keep her neighbours ignorant of both the Japanese and Wizarding aspects of her heritage. She cut off relations with her parents altogether after her mother’s thoughtlessly disparaging remarks about Severus's nose, and she ceased speaking to her sister after one too many queries about the contusions and scrapes she didn't want to explain.
From his mother, Severus Snape learned how to analyze spells and reconfigure them as needed. From his mother, Snape learned to hold conventional wisdom in contempt. Thanks to his mother, Snape understood that keeping his classmates ignorant of his background was an act of pre-emptive self-defence. Thanks to his mother, Snape arrived at Hogwarts thoroughly versed in wordless Japanese hexes that did work in Scotland. Not recognising the spells, almost all the other children readily assumed he was a devotee of Dark magic; the only one with the wit and fearlessness to ask him about actual details was Remus Lupin.
The two boys kept their association secret from the very beginning: Snape’s housemates would have disapproved of Lupin, who was half-Muggle, a quarter French, openly bookish, and completely lacking in style as well as pedigree. Lupin’s closest friends despised Snape for being a swot and a tattletale, and Lupin kept quiet about the fact that he looked forward to James and Sirius’s many detentions as much as Snape did.
When they managed to steal time together, Snape and Lupin didn’t waste it discussing their friends or their families. Instead, the two boys concentrated on more pleasant puzzles: the volatility of certain plant hybrids, the intersections of seemingly contradictory theories, and the intricate construction of assorted artefacts. It being understood that they would share nothing of their sessions together with anyone else, Snape taught Lupin his hexes, although he chose not to disclose how he had learned them or even that they were Japanese in origin. For his part, Lupin seemed equally reluctant to discuss his own childhood or how he had attained his extraordinary familiarity with painkilling remedies -- a range of knowledge that included Dark potions and Muggle pills as well as traditional Wizarding compounds.
Like Snape, Lupin was not as naturally gifted as James Potter or Sirius Black, but he possessed a patience his more charismatic companions lacked. Whereas Potter and Black were interested exclusively in results, Lupin actually enjoyed immersing himself in the analysis of techniques and procedures. When he was alone with Lupin, Snape felt free of the defensiveness that dogged his interactions with his parents, his teachers, and his other peers -- he could trust Lupin not to ridicule his in-depth rereadings of Schillermarbach’s treatises on Occlumency, and he could respect Lupin’s fascination with goblin metalcrafting. Around Lupin, Snape could forget that he was mediocre at games and hopeless around girls; Lupin exhibited neither prowess nor interest in either arena. Snape did resent how, unlike other sensitive, hormonally undemonstrative boys, Lupin was seldom taunted as a "nancy-boy" and "poof," thanks to his status as a comrade of Potter and Black. Snape also fantasised, however, about cosily comfortable evenings in faraway libraries, and of other not-yet-speakable possibilities beyond the walls of Hogwarts.
But when Snape discovered that Lupin was a werewolf, he concluded he had been the butt of a cosmic joke: of course Lupin was willing to spend time with him, because Lupin was more of a freak than he himself would ever be -- and yet it was Lupin who ran with James Potter’s pack, and Lupin who was a prefect, and Lupin who somehow managed to blend in just enough with the crowds to avoid raising their suspicions. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair, and Snape could bear it no longer: four days after his encounter with Lupin the werewolf, Severus Snape entered the Room of Requirement, jabbed his wand against his temple, and extracted from his mind every shred of admiration and affection he had harboured for Remus Lupin, pulverising the memories into a toxic potion that he decanted into a small silver flask.
He promised himself he would someday deliver its contents to Remus Lupin: he wanted to show Lupin what it meant to be consumed alive. He clung to his loathing throughout Lupin’s tenure as the Hogwarts DADA instructor, periodically setting the flask on his desk and contemplating whether to incorporate it into the next batch of Wolfsbane, but ultimately forcing himself to wait. It would have been the height of self-indulgence to destroy Lupin before he took full advantage of the man’s foolish attachment to Sirius Black.
The day after Lupin departed from Hogwarts, Snape hurled the flask against the wall of his office. It clanged on the stone, the sound reminding him of an ancient fencing manual he had once pored over in Lupin’s company. Snape berated himself for forgetting that he was the joke. The Order of Merlin would never be his, and he would never be the Headmaster’s favourite, no matter how competently and thoroughly he discharged his duties. The humiliation of his thwarted capture of Black should have qualified as his new worst memory, but he saw it merely as a coda to the earlier ones: he would never again let himself imagine that the universe was formulated upon any semblance of fairness or grace.
It was a lesson he did his best to impart to his students and to the rest of the Order: the sooner they stopped expecting the world to be just and kind, the better equipped they would be to save it. He seized every opportunity to belittle young Potter (You may be "special," but as long as I can have any say about it, you can bloody well pay the same dues as the rest of us) and snarled past the dryness in his throat whenever he observed Granger’s obsessive overcompensation for her gawky appearance and non-Wizard pedigree. He refused to acknowledge the satisfaction he felt whenever she managed to retain her composure; in a similar vein, he insisted on regarding his research on palliative potions as occasional rather than ongoing, even though the subject somehow hijacked his attention every time the moon waxed gibbous. Nor did he dwell on his penchant for thin men with greying hair and hoarse voices during his rare one-night stands in London and Glasgow.
He continued to conceal his Japanese ancestry, rooting against the Toyahashi Tengu with particular vehemence and insisting that kappas were Mongolian. His grandparents, parents, and aunt had all passed away during Voldemort’s first reign of terror, and most of the teachers his grandmother had harassed were also gone; the ones still active had outlasted so many difficult parents since Mrs. Prince that she had long since faded from their memories. Although Snape hoped he wouldn't have to resort to hiding in Asia, he nevertheless retained a Swiss broker to manage his Tamonten account and covertly memorised the geography of Tokyo, all the while intimating to his colleagues that his heart’s desire was to retire to Denmark or Transylvania.
Years later, when he read about the Ministry’s manhunts in Copenhagen and Cluj-Napoca, Snape mentally awarded himself ten points for correctly anticipating his pursuers' moves. Upon the demise of the Dark Lord, his first relocation had been to the east coast of the United States: Draco Malfoy was still his problem, and he had realised that managing a spoiled teenager in a non-English speaking country would be beyond his powers. That said, metropolitan Boston still offered plenty of trouble for bored adolescents to seek out, and once the brat ran afoul of the wrong thugs in Dorchester, not even Albus could have saved him.
Alone, Snape subsequently proceeded to zigzag around the Americas, partaking of community education courses in Japanese language and culture while planting false clues to steer anyone overly interested in his whereabouts back towards Europe. He was still unenthused about immigrating to Tokyo, but its environs offered him his best odds of retaining his liberty: it was all but impossible for a European wizard to perform magic in Japan without being conspicuous, but this also deterred both would-be expatriates and those on their trail from viewing Japan as a plausible destination. There being very little interaction between the Japanese and British Ministries of Magic, Snape could reasonably expect to remain at large -- provided he drew no attention to himself as a wizard. In other words, provided he ceased practicing magic.
He took no joy in the prospect of living exclusively as a Muggle, but he knew he was capable of doing so. According to the travel guides and Sunday newsmagazines he'd consulted, bewildered tourists and underprepared teachers of English were not a novelty in urban Japan. Snape would have balked at returning to classroom teaching under most circumstances, and to do so for one of the popular mega-schools was out of the question. Their employees were expected to function not only as language tutors, but also as genial ambassadors of English-speaking goodwill, and Snape felt he would rather herd nekomatas than subject himself indefinitely to yet another unsuitable role.
Instead, he set about crafting his new identity as a research analyst -- one senior enough at his firm to be entrusted with work complex enough to mandate an extended overseas residency. He acquired a license for the company in question, "_______ and Associates," filling in the blank with a name so bland and so common that anyone wishing to authenticate his employer's existence would be required to sift through the listings of the six engineering consultancies, ten law firms, consortium of publishers' representatives, and dozens of insurance agencies all doing business under that same name. Snape thought it unlikely that casual investigators would subject themselves to that degree of bother; in fact, he was counting on most of them mistaking one of the other companies for his own.
Nevertheless, he also invested considerable effort in fabricating his professional portfolio, as it was crucial that he be able to supply passable verification to anyone insistent on checking his papers or his references. He purchased impeccably forged credentials -- and privately confirmed that the relevant registrars' databases had been appropriately and comprehensively modified. He sent himself contract assignments from a number of imaginary customers, the better to create paper and electronic trails to support his pseudo-history of "recent projects completed." He intermixed them with a handful of short-term tasks he completed for actual clients; in doing so, he discovered that he could dodge most inquiries about his work with the splendid phrase "confidentiality agreement." As he travelled around the southeastern United States, stitching into place his multiple strands of identities and histories and alibis, Snape found it surprisingly easy to pass as a native of Boston: his questionable driving skills and his impatience with meandering small talk were apparently par for the course among transplants from New England, and his unattractive looks stood him in good stead: his classmates and other acquaintances asked him only superficial questions about his life, preferring to flirt and network with more handsome prospects.
He Apparated back to Massachusetts once a week, both to accrue more first-hand details for his fictional background and to visit the Wizarding reading room in Boston's North End. It was usually a brief stop -- just long enough to skim the most recent papers -- but the Prophet's report on Charles Weasley's sentencing gave him pause. Snape's fingers itched for one of his grading quills -- the article was a classic example of the newspaper's overly wordy yet underinformative fare, offering few salient details about Weasley's crime. However, this much was clear: the chief witness for the prosecution had been Remus Lupin, and the photograph of the post-hearing crowd featured Molly Weasley attempting to scratch out Lupin's eyes.
Feeling suddenly unsteady, Snape took the paper to a carrel and sat down in front of it, forcing himself to review the image methodically and itemise the people in its centre: William and Fleur Weasley, restraining Molly. Arthur Weasley, looking defeated and bereft. Nymphadora Tonks -- not at Lupin's side but at Arthur's, as if lending the older man her support, and her hair as red as Ginevra's. Ginevra and Ronald, flanked by Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. The two youngest Weasleys were glaring at Lupin with undiluted hatred, whereas Potter's face reflected both anger and bewilderment, and Granger's countenance was suffused with sorrow. The entire crowd looked ready to hex Lupin into oblivion … and Lupin stood tall, his expression remote, his posture radiating both utter fearlessness and utter isolation.
Snape had occasionally glimpsed such a scene in his dreams, mentally giving it the caption of "The Mob and the Werewolf." Snape's imagination had featured a Lupin who pleaded with his friends -- sometimes for forgiveness, sometimes for his very life -- with the desperation and shamelessness of a cornered animal. In the photograph, however, Lupin carried himself with a calm and regal air, appearing wholly civilised -- wholly in control --in contrast to the sea of rage- and hysteria-afflicted people surrounding him.
Snape stared at Lupin's figure, his mind scrambling to reconcile his hyperawareness of the werewolf's failings with this manifestation of courage. He muttered a magnification charm that enlarged the photograph enough for Snape to study Lupin's eyes (what wouldn't I give right now to perform Legilimency…), and he recognised what he saw there: not humility. Not regret. Not compassion. Lupin's eyes burned with a terrible clarity -- that of a man who has knowingly sealed his own doom.
Snape sat very still for a long time. He was all too familiar with that look: it had greeted him from various mirrors over the past year.
During the weeks that followed, Snape's thoughts repeatedly returned to Lupin, his mind both revisiting the photograph and replaying their interactions over the years while he continued his preparations to shift to an all-Muggle lifestyle. He had been acquainted with non-magic-assisted chores as a child, of course, and it was neither rocket science nor a Dark Art to follow the instructions for operating microwave ovens and other appliances. To familiarise himself with common American assumptions and points of reference, he discreetly devoured children's books under the pretext of browsing for a nephew and skimmed guidebooks with words such as Quick, Everything, and Dummies in their titles. He used public library terminals to correspond with his Swiss money manager, arranging for the interest income from his savings to be transferred to a yubin chokin -- a type of Muggle interface through which his funds would be accessible from any post office in Japan, sparing him from having to visit Tamonten Bank in person. He practiced arithmetic with a variety of Japanese counting units until he was able to manipulate them fluently, calculating sums and percentages without first converting them into English, and he ratified his agent's selection of a seven-tatami apartment in the Akihabara district.
In the midst of all this, Snape tried to avoid thinking of the Room of Requirement and the silver flask he had returned to it prior to his final term at Hogwarts. Knowing he would almost certainly have to flee without warning, he had surreptitiously disposed of many non-essential possessions even before being appointed to the DADA professorship, and the flask of memory venom was a luxury he could ill-afford to have discovered in his possession. In the wake of his revived desire for Lupin -- an infatuation that had him scanning the reading room papers for any mention of the man, however minor -- a part of him longed to retrieve the flask, the better to restore his discarded memories to some semblance of their original state. Because he could not remember why Lupin had mattered so much to him, his mind insisted on plaguing him with sensual and romantic vignettes from the vestiges of his fantasies in lieu of the mundane actualities -- whatever they had been -- that he had once shared with Lupin.
He was startled to realise how glad he was Lupin had not been eaten alive, literally or figuratively, and he mentally thanked the gods for the ineptitude of both Greyback's minions and immature Aurors. Realistically, he understood it was unlikely he would ever see Lupin again, but he still drew a measure of satisfaction in knowing the man remained at liberty. He knew his feelings to be illogical, but he nevertheless felt less alone knowing that Lupin was likewise alone -- that Lupin fully knew what it meant to sacrifice friendship to justice. That Lupin had become a man worthy of respect -- perhaps even of being cherished: Snape's mind certainly seemed intent on dwelling upon him, entranced by his stance in the Prophet photograph.
He was therefore all the more shattered when he read Lupin's obituary in the Prophet two months later. Snape stared in disbelief at the report of an avalanche in the Pyrenees, and for a brief, horrible moment, he even wondered if Lupin had been following one of his false clues -- if he was somehow responsible for this death in addition to the others.
Then he ordered himself to retrieve his command of perspective: it was as egocentric to assume blame for all disasters as it was to insist on credit for every triumph. Snape carefully set the paper back into the reading room rack and stepped outside, ignoring the rain as he strode toward the Charlestown Bridge, hoping the physical activity would shake his wits back into place. There were few people outside in such weather, excepting a handful of dedicated joggers and a smattering of hapless tourists returning from the dock at which the USS Constitution was moored. None of them paid any heed to the others, and Snape considered this as much of a sign as any the universe was likely to spare for him: it was time.
He Apparated back to his rooms. Although he was determined to avoid using his wand for the foreseeable future, he could not stomach the thought of destroying it or casting it into the Charles. Instead, he held it briefly to his lips, and then inserted it through the left-hand loops of a battered MIT pennant. He wrapped the fabric around the wood before adding it to a pouch in which he'd also placed random coins, a souvenir deck of playing cards, a worn paperback copy of The Art of War, and a green-ribboned garter he'd confiscated from a student two years before -- a collection that would pass muster as the sentimental hoard of a bachelor, he hoped. He cushioned the pouch between two of the sweaters in his rolling suitcase, and inspected his papers once last time before zipping up his briefcase.
Snape closed his eyes, mentally bid farewell to America, and Apparated into a northern corner of Ueno Park. Opening his eyes, he silently bid farewell to magic and began to walk past the tents of the homeless.
Part 2
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