Snape's Fairy

TWO LONELY SOULS

The summer night air was crisp and warm and mingled with the scent of dew, wet oak wood, and nearby lavender. In the distance somewhere, a dog let out three barks before going quiet again. Male crickets were chirping in an attempt to attract a female, adding an annoying or soothing sound depending on who you were. For a small organism such as Harry, the chirping was insanely loud but he enjoyed it much like any other teenager would enjoy rock, metal, techno or rap music on full volume.

Harry stretched himself gently over his rock, mindful of the delicate wings on his back and stared up at the night sky, just listening to the sounds of the insects all around him until a familiar face was hanging over him.

“BOY! Just what exactly do you think you are doing?” the purple-face of his uncle demanded, some spittle falling onto his nephew’s face.

Harry immediately sat up, noting the brown moth-like wings that were fluttering in agitation as he brushed the spittle off of himself and tried to hide his disgust. “I’m sorry Uncle Vernon… I…”

A pudgy hand gripping an already abused ear silenced him. “Never you mind, Boy. If I catch you out here again, if the cats and humans don’t kill you I will.”

“Yes, Uncle,” Harry whimpered , he knew from twelve years of experience that his uncle while never actually going as far to kill him would beat him until he wished he was dead. He nearly sighed in relief when the grip shifted to his clothes and his uncle dragged him by his ugly brown tunic home through the grass.

Home for Harry wasn’t as calming as being outside. It smelled of mixture of honeydew, fresh lichen and moss and to any other of Harry’s kind this smell would be welcomed in any home for it meant plentiful food but for Harry who barely got a meal a day it was just something to make his stomach rumble. The entire home also reeked of bad taste.

The home had three levels and two were cluttered with expensive items such as crystal sculptures but the subjects of themselves were rather tasteless in subject matter such as unicorns or the Dursley family symbol of the ladybug. The spidersilk curtains also were tapestries of ladybugs. The only interesting things in the house were the beautifully carved spiral staircase (heavily enforced to hold the weight of the two Dursley males) leading to each level and what resided on the third level studio that drew many of their kind: the family art for which Harry’s father’s family had been known for- ceramics.

Those ceramics were the only reason why Vernon had been concerned enough to venture outside at night. Some were merely for functional purposes such as for carrying water or food but some like his most frequent customers the Malfoys believed Harry’s family had the gift of weaving protective and healing spells into their pottery since the family had first adopted the occupation of potters (not that Harry himself believed it). Harry was the family’s meal ticket and everyone knew it even the customers of his fine pottery although none really knew that Harry himself hardly ever enjoyed the meal.

“Petunia, I found him. The ungrateful whelp was out on a rock,” Uncle Vernon boomed, holding the boy still by his threadbare, extremely large clothes, castoffs of the beetle-shaped boy he had to call cousin, who had just appeared on the spiral staircase which creaked and moaned under its large burden.

Ungrateful? What had he to be grateful about? Sure, his family had been ‘kind’ enough to take in a five year old when his old home had been cut down by humans and his parents had been killed but that was the only thing they had ever done for him.

“Did you just roll your eyes, Boy?” Uncle Vernon demanded, with three rough shakes that led Harry into a coughing fit.

“Na…” cough “no so…” cough “sorry Unc…” cough “Uncle Vernon.” Years of unsanitary working with clay and semi-toxic glazes getting into his food and nose from the age of five had allowed far too much toxins into his fragile body and eventually damaged his lungs. It didn’t help that Harry was undernourished since that age either.

When Harry began to turn a slight bluish tinge, the pudgy hands finally released him and he collapsed on the floor, crying out in pain as he fell on one of his delicate wings. When he had finally caught his breath, he could hear Dudley snickering in the background. Sometimes Harry swore Dudley should be a human with his fascination and delight for cruelty.

“Get up to your room, Boy!” Uncle Vernon shouted, his face and smoehow his wings taking on a purplish tinge.

Knowing he would already have bruises the next day and not wanting to furthur injure his wings in a foolish fight with his uncle, Harry ascended the staircase.
-----

Severus Snape scoffed through his very quiet and empty English country house, mumbling about the idiocies of students in his biology classes. For the love of God, the youngest Weasley boy had identified a spider as an insect on his test! Arachnids were members of the phylum Arthropoda. If Severus was not mistaken, he remembered stating exactly that at the beginning of the year. But he supposed the boy had been taking a nap through that class, really the boy had no respect.

Flinging aside the appalling tests with a shudder, Severus pondered the fate of his country within the hands of his moronic students as he journeyed to the kitchen for the traditional evening tea and scone. It was a tradition his mother had invented and had maintained even into her final years where she seemed to regress into childhood and he himself maintained it in her memory.

Placing water and tea leaves into the kettle on the stove, he went into the cabinet to dig out four delicious scones he had purchased at the local bakery and fresh made jam he himself made from the wild strawberries in the fields near the forest and a few yards away from the house as per his mother’s recipe. Nothing store bought was a scrumptious as his mother’s homemade jam. He still remembered thirteen years ago when he had returned from his last year at college to find there was no strawberries due to Tom Riddle’s company over logging the forest and they had had to do with store bought jams although his mother had managed to salvage some strawberries from the destruction to make one jar instead of the usual twelve.

As he arranged the scones around the jam in the usual manner and set them on the small wooden table, the kettle whistled to signal tea was done. He then turned the stove off, poured himself some tea and adjourned to the table. He sat in a chair facing the stove, away from the monstrosity that stood in testament of his mother’s final years of madness.

In the other room facing the kitchen stood an intricate and elaborate wooden doll’s house resembling Snape Cottage, complete with glass windows and tiny doors that could be opened by tiny hands on the inside. In fact, the house was constructed in such a way that should an actual child wish to play with house, they would be unable to unless they literally ripped the roof off. There was even little, finely crafted furniture inside the house including a child’s room complete with a tiny, comfy-looking bed on the second floor.

Little did he know when he saw it the summer he returned home after finishing college that the house would represent the beginning of his mother’s break from reality. He had though his mother had made it for a friend’s daughter, maybe even her hinting at her desire for grandchildren, until his mother started talking about her ‘little friends.’

‘Fairies,’ she had said, holding an impossibly small-sized teddy bear, ‘the size of dolls. And they’re coming with their child- such a beautiful boy.’

Only the fairies never came, but his mother still kept saying they would. She had waited until the day she died for the fairy couple- Jamal and Lillian was it?- and their child- Harvey?.

Severus really didn’t know why he didn’t just throw the thing away, but he supposed it was because his mother had worked so hard on it, so he simply chose to ignore its presence in his home.

After enjoying the last bit of the homemade scones, he took one last sip of his tea before calling his cat Atlas in for the night and going to bed.

TBC

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