Professor Severus Snape's Fan-Mail Club

A/N: Thank you to all those who waited patiently for the revamped return of this little piece. I do hope you all will have a lot of fun with it! Do feel free to send your letters to the bitter Professor either in the review section (as so many of you have done in the past) or via email, I’ll see to it that he gets them. Please, remember to be kind, he's a human being, despite what some people think. All letters will be answered in order received. Thank you.


Memoirs of Mrs. Charming or How Severus & I Met (when the Daily Prophet forced me to go and deliver his very first batch of fan-mail.)


I was quite nervous as I stepped into his office, I’d only read about him, never actually had an interview with him, though I’d come close. Ever since the fall of the Dark Lord he’d been a prized and coveted war hero. He was the dark man of mystery, a tortured soul, the bad boy, the misunderstood being crying out for understanding. I couldn’t very well see what all they saw in him, none of those titles seemed appropriate. I was more apt to believe the words of Ron Weasley; his titles for Severus Snape seemed far more fitting: Greasy Git, Slimy Bastard, Overgrown Bat with a venomous tongue, those things seemed to be more a kin to the man that I was being forced upon.

I couldn’t deny that I was interested, how often does one get the chance to work with someone famous? But the task at hand was not going to be an easy one. I didn’t mind the challenge, though; work was about the only thing keeping me from taking a royal dive right off a very high cliff. My marriage was in ruins and it was the only thing that was more talked about in the news and media than Severus Snape’s state of bachelorhood. I couldn’t avoid it; everywhere I went I was hounded by photos of me and that awful man who was still technically (and much to my chagrin, legally) my husband.

But that’s another story. The story we’re focusing on is my work for the Daily Prophet and how I needed to be kept busy. My boss, Ken, was sick and tired of the hundreds of letters that we were receiving on a daily basis that were addressed to one Severus Snape, said aforementioned titles attached. Hogwarts was bouncing them back left and right, and somehow they’d managed to get most of their owls to send his mail here. It was all fan mail; letters filled with questions, poems, song lyrics, and the occasional marriage proposal, not to mention various other proposals.

Ken got this fantastic idea in his head that we could turn a quick profit out of this and increase sales and subscriptions tenfold if we simply published a column (which quickly became a whole page and then some) of the man’s responses to the letters. Of course, I’m not exactly sure what Ken was thinking when he proposed this, but that’s what brought me here.

Minerva McGonagall, the current Deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts, had been willing enough to contract the man into answering his fan mail. She failed, however, to mention that she had not told Severus about said contract, thus bringing me to my current position.

He glared at me, the quill in his hand gripped between deathly white fingers, black orbs boring rays of death in my general direction. “Who are you and how did you get in here?”

“My name is—” I paused. I knew that was a mistake that would later bite me in the ass, but I hadn’t really thought about it. If I told him the truth, Cinderella Charming, well it just wasn’t good. Unfortunately for me, I’m not a very good ‘on-my-feet’ liar. “My name is Cinderella Charming and I’m here from the Daily Prophet.”

Severus Snape, Potions Master, celebrated War Hero, and all things else, just continued to stare at me. It was a long, tense moment before he finally spoke. “I don’t do interviews.” He spat and then lowered his gaze back to the parchment he’d been striking with red when I walked in. I was about to take a step forward but he waved his hand, dismissing me.

It was rather infuriating, but I seemed to have lost my nerve for the moment. “Sir,” I started again, a bit more courage having been mustered in my voice. “I’ve come to notate the responses to your fan mail.” I paused again. He kept scribbling as if I weren’t there, or I was but he hadn’t heard a word. “The Daily Prophet has sent me over with the freshest batch, now, obviously we don’t expect you to get through all of them, but I’m supposed to come by once a day for a few hours and read you these letters, and then I’m supposed to record your responses so that they may be published in—”

“What did you say your name was?” he drawled, but he did not look up.

“Charming. Cinderella Charming.”

“Yes, Miss Charming. Well, whatever it is you’re supposed to do, you will do it just as well without me I suspect. And furthermore, you shall do whatever it is that you’re supposed to do without being in my presence. If the Daily Prophet wants some story, talk to my colleagues, I’ve not the time of day for such fodder.”

He was quite rude, though at least he’d bothered to get my name. I bit my lower lip, it was a nasty habit at best, but it kept me from shooting my mouth off. “With all due respect, Mr. Snape,” I certainly wasn’t going to address him as professor; he wasn’t my teacher after all. “If you had no interest in taking this project on then why did you sign the contract?”

His head nearly snapped up at my words. Before I could process his reaction the man, who towered a good two heads over me, was standing just in front of me. “What the bloody hell are you on about?” I had expected him to yell. Only, he didn’t. The voice that had slipped through his lips was icy; it stung, and was so quiet that I almost hadn’t heard it.

“The contract, Mr. Snape, you signed the contract stating your agreement to this.”

“I did no bloody such thing!” He hissed.

“But, you most certainly did,” I said, taking a step back only to find myself back against the door I had came in through. “If you’d just…here,” I fished around in my purse as best I could with him practically breathing down my neck. Producing the parchment scroll, I handed it to him. Severus Snape was quick to snatch it from me and stalked back across his office as he read the thing.

“That meddling witch!” he growled and hurled the paper back at me.

“That’s uncalled for!” I shouted.

“Well, forgive me for my temper.” His voice dripped sarcasm. “You must have a gluttony for punishment or else are hated by your superiors to have been given this job.” He spat. Magical contracts were binding, regardless of the person’s will or desire to participate and with Minerva keeping him in her charge, there was little he could do about it.

I’d all but forgotten the sack of letters that I’d shrunk and put into my purse before coming to him. I made a mental note to speak to Headmistress McGonagall later. “Um, I suppose we should get started then?” I said. I felt like a mouse and he was a great big snake ready to have me for dinner and not in the friendly guest sort of way.

Again he glared at me. “What choice do I have?” he hissed and flopped down into the chair behind his desk. “Though if you’re going to insist on doing this, I’m going to insist on the following,” he crossed his arms over his chest and narrowed his eyes at me. “No Quick Quote Quills. If you’re going to take notes, you’ll do it verbatim and by hand.”

I nodded and waited for him to continue.

“You will owl before you stop by for these little sessions. We’re done when I say we’re done. No earlier than seven and no later than midnight, those are the hours in which I will find time to entertain this ridiculous notion.” Again I nodded, too afraid to speak or contradict him. “Is that clear?”

“Mr. Snape, I do think it would be in both our best interests to not make an enemy of one another. It seems we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”

His lips curled into a cruel sneer and I could see that he was about to fire off a round of insults but something stopped him. I don’t know what it was, and frankly I don’t care, I was grateful for the stopper in the verbal assault. “You’re the girl who’s in the news almost as much as I am.” He said it without sympathy or pity, but as if he were recognizing me for the first time.

I knew that hoping for pity or sympathy from someone like him was far too much, but perhaps he would realize we were really quite the same when it came to our lives being invaded and ruined by the general public. “Yes,” I said. “Yes I am. Now, let’s get started shall we? I wouldn’t want to take up any more of either of our personal time than necessary.” Reaching into my purse, I pulled out the satchel of mail, my wand, my notepad and a lovely good old fashioned ink pen. “Ready?” I asked, even though I knew I wasn’t.