Folly, A Harry Potter Fanfic
Summary: Snape’s life has been a series of spectacular errors of judgment, to put it kindly.
This has to have been his worst.
“All the privilege I claim… (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it)…. is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Jane Austen, Persuasion
“…’Tis folly to be wise..” Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
Snape woke to the smell of smoke. Who the hell would light a bonfire at dawn?
Besides, wasn’t that supposed to be illegal now?
The smoke was coming up though his window. From his garden.
Severus Apparated down before he was fully awake. His left foot landed on something that rolled underneath, and he fell headlong, almost landing on his nose in a smouldering mess of sticks and old newspapers.
Severus reached back and fished up the object that he’d fallen over. A disposable lighter. A fucking disposable Muggle lighter.
“Where the fuck did this come from?”
“I stole it.” The boy was there, facing him, eyes glittering in terror and triumph. “I stole it! From Mr. Gunderson! I’m not a good boy, I’m not! Not for the Muggles, and not for you! I’m not!”
Snape levered himself to his knees, acutely aware of his nightshirt flapping and his compromised dignity. Could the boy be a pyromaniac? But if so, wouldn’t he be a pyromancer, not stealing the neighbor’s lighter?
What the absolute fuck?!
He closed his mouth on that utterance. The books would recommend a more moderate approach. “Neville, what the bloody hell are you DOING?!”
Wait, that didn’t come out quite right.
Neville didn’t seem to notice his profanity. He was dancing gleefully on the far side of the dying flames. He panted, tearstained, soot-streaked, and laughing all at once, “You’re a liar. A liar! A liar!”
The boy looked down at the fire and glared back up at Snape in triumph. ‘And you’re too late!”
Severus blinked, and looked again at that sorry excuse for a bonfire. Too late for what?
Then he saw that Neville’s hands were burned. Second degree, blisters, and the idiot child was fucking opening the blisters by scrabbling at his sticks, trying to poke up the flames. And his feet, his bare feet-had the boy been kicking at the fire? For the first time Severus saw the reasoning behind Muggle flameproof pyjamas for children; had those gaily flapping train-printed sleeves and legs fucking caught fire!-
Snape was across the bonfire, holding Neville’s wrists immobile. The boy struggled in his hold and cried.
The child’s struggles redoubled hysterically when Snape tried to carry him inside, so Snape finally just summoned the burn salve and gauze and treated the boy on the bench by the door, where the child could keep watch over his dying fire. Which Neville did, resolutely, never once looking at his warder as Snape methodically cleaned and anointed and bandaged every hurt that he could find. Feet, legs, hands, arms, fuck, his face, apparently from one stray flying cinder….
The salve was numbing as well as healing, and it had soporific properties too, in larger dosages. The boy eventually subsided against Snape’s chest.
But still the boy stirred a little restlessly in his arms and muttered, faintly, “Liar.”
“What was it that I lied about, Neville?” Severus finally asked, controlling his voice.
Amongst all the choices.
The boy flinched away faintly but noticeably from Severus’s hands, trying clumsily to pat him comfortingly.
And the child started leaking tears again.
“All right,” Severus said, tightening his grip a little. “All right. Later. You can tell me that part later. But, Neville,” his voice started rising despite his best efforts to moderate it, “What the hell did you think you were doing, starting that fire? You knew you could get hurt.”
The boy stiffened, and suddenly flung himself completely out of Snape’s arms to scrabble in the dirt beside the embers. He snatched something up in his bandaged hands, turned, and hurled it hard at Severus, screaming, “You can’t do it now! I hate you, and you’re a liar, and you can’t do it now! Look!”
Snape Accioed the object automatically at it flew past him. The boy couldn’t throw for toffee. What…?
A tiny ebony box, lid gone, one twisted silver hinge still dangling. Eileen’s casket…!
Neville had destroyed his mother’s casket?! Severus surged to his feet, mouth opening to shout again.
But the boy was facing him with that weird mixture of terror and triumph. Before Severus could draw breath to berate him, Neville shrieked, “You’re a liar! And I hate you! And you CAN’T send me back now!”
Severus remembered, then, what had been in the casket. He recoiled as though at a spell-whiplash, fighting to re-assemble his scattered thoughts.
The boy screamed, hopping on his bandaged feet, ‘You CAN’T give me back now! And I HATE you! And you’re a LIAR!”
Severus wasn’t sure if he’d Apparated or run, but he was holding Neville pinioned in his arms, all pressure taken off those feet. And he wasn’t about to let go, however Neville struggled against his hold. No matter in what terms the child protested.
Severus said, or tried to say, “Neville. What is it that you think I’m lying about?”
He wasn’t sure that it came out quite right. He wasn’t sure, even, whether he’d whispered it, or yelled it, or maybe only thought it.
But the boy heard him, anyhow. At least, he responded. He went limp against Severus and started crying, But Severus could just make out the muffled wail against his chest. “You said that I was your boy now. You did.”
Then Neville stiffened again, and his bandaged fists started beating at Snape’s back in time to his words. “But you lied. You lied. You lied.”
Severus shut his eyes and held the crying child against him. Eventually Neville’s arms and legs moved around to cling like a baby monkey’s.
Severus held him, and finally sighed.
The boy simply didn’t understand his own self interest; that was evident now.
No one in the world could imagine the child better as off the Muggle-born bastard of a half-blood Death Eater than as the coddled scion of wealthy, influential, well-connected Purebloods who’d been indisputably on the right side of the last war.
No one in his world.
And no one could let a child make so foolish and irresponsible a choice.
His arms tightened around the boy, and his eyes squeezed more tightly shut. No one.
The responsible thing to do now, now that Snape understood the real problem, would be to explain to the child more clearly why his staying would be deplorable folly. Explain to the child why he shouldn’t wish it, instead of just assuming that he naturally would not.
And then convince him somehow that he wasn’t being sent back because, yet again, he was unwanted.
The child’s sobs slowly dwindled to snuffling as Severus clutched him. Severus shifted him a little higher, and brushed his unshaven cheek against the top of a head.
No one could be so irresponsible as to let a child make so foolish a choice. No one.
The light had been brightening gradually against his shut eyelids, and his feet were freezing from the dew. Severus finally opened his eyes, sighed again, and shuffled back, numb-footed and shivering, to the bench. He sat down, settling Neville firmly on his lap. The child was still snorting damply into Severus’s nightshirt.
Snape’s own eyes were dry.
Folly.
He said very softly, stroking the sniffling child’s hair, “You understand, Neville, that I’m very angry with you on several counts. First, you did some things that you knew full well you should never have done, whatever the outcome. You stole Mr. Gunderson’s lighter, and you used it to start a fire. You knew that these both were wrong, and that I-that everyone-would be very angry with you just for that, for stealing and doing wrong. And then too, you also knew that starting a fire might hurt you, and it did. I’m very angry at you for that too, for burning yourself so badly, and you knew that I would be.
“And then, your reason for doing all this, Neville, for doing what you knew was wrong, and what certainly would get you into trouble and make me angry with you, and would maybe hurt you-was, you wanted to force me to do something against my will.”
He gave the soft hair a final stroke and set the child on the bench next to him. Neville didn’t want to look up at him, but Severus held him by the shoulders, his thumbs stroking softly, until Neville finally met his eyes despairingly.
“Isn’t that true, Neville? You did all this, got yourself in trouble, hurt yourself, made me angry, because you wanted to force me to give up the idea of giving you back to your birth family? You did all this to destroy the hairs I’d need to make the potion to give you back?”
The boy nodded, transfixed in Severus’s gaze. “So you did all this, really, to try to force ME.” Severus bent lower and let his hands grip more firmly. “And, Neville, no one at all likes to be forced. Did you think me different? Did you think I’d LIKE to be forced to keep you, if I wanted to give you back? Did you?”
The boy gulped; it was clear that that particular aspect of the matter had not previously occurred to him. Severus watched Neville’s dawning look of sick despair.
“There’s another aspect that offends, me, Neville: your disrespect. Oh, not deliberate, on this occasion. I mean only that, on a matter as important as your patrimony, it’s disrespectful to my intelligence that you should imagine that I would keep all the evidence in one place, or give it over to the custody of a child. That would be very foolish, you see. What if something happened to it? Neville, it offends me deeply that you could have imagined me guilty of such lack of foresight.
“And I wasn’t, Neville. When I gave you that casket, it didn’t contain all the hairs I’d originally garnered from you. I gave you some, to reassure you as I thought, but I kept the rest.”
Neville’s face turned to the entrance to the house, and then returned to Severus’s face with growing horror.
Oh, smart boy.
“So you did it all for nothing, Neville. When you destroyed the hairs I gave you, the box I gave you, you didn’t coerce me in any way. Though you tried to. You’re guilty of trying to. I still have the rest of those hairs, Neville. I can still do what I want with them. Do you want to see them? Shall I prove that I still have them?”
Neville shook his head frantically. Severus said, “Well, I think that I should. No one likes being forced, remember, Neville. Or being called a liar. Maybe you don’t believe me. I think that I should prove it.” He waved his wand lazily.
Neville watched the door with fascinated despair, but it was Snape’s open window that the envelope flew out of. Snape caught it, and transfigured the envelope to a small ebony bowl. The tiny dun hairs glinted brightly against the blackness. Neville stared at them, transfixed.
Severus said softly, “Here they are. If I want to send you back, I still can. So now try to stop me. Do your best.”
Another wave, and the bowl was floating in midair before the bench.
With a cry of despair, the boy sprang at it. He rebounded against empty air. Sobbing wildly again, he beat against the invisible dome, trying to batter it down. When that failed, he darted away suddenly, and came back with Mr. Gunderson’s lighter. Snape vanished that abomination from midair, and the boy then grabbed a still-smouldering stick and beat it against the air, sparks flying.
Snape let him flail for a few more seconds, then stood up and said, “Enough! Stop now, Neville, or I’ll put a body-bind on you.”
Neville halted in mid-careem, shocked silent by this threat.
“Now listen to me. Do you understand now, Neville, that you cannot force me to keep you, if I don’t want to? No matter what you do? You cannot force me?”
“I hate you. I hate you!”
“You may hate me, but you can’t make me keep you if I don’t want to. Do you understand that? Answer!”
The boy’s face finally crumpled. “I can’t….”
“I could still give you back, as long as I still have these hairs, right? I could, couldn’t I? And there’s nothing at all that you can do to stop me.”
The boy turned away, shaking, and Severus said sharply, “No, Neville. You need to see this. Look at me!”
He knelt down next to the bowl, raised his wand, and waited for the trembling child to turn. Eventually he repeated softly, “Neville. Look at me.”
Neville finally obeyed, his face smeared with tears and snot. Severus cupped his left hand around the back of the child’s head, holding him so he couldn’t look away. He said softly, “I could still give you back. As long as I had the hairs.”
He exhaled. “And if I wanted to. Watch me, Neville.
“Incendio!”
This has to have been his worst.
“All the privilege I claim… (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it)…. is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” Jane Austen, Persuasion
“…’Tis folly to be wise..” Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
Snape woke to the smell of smoke. Who the hell would light a bonfire at dawn?
Besides, wasn’t that supposed to be illegal now?
The smoke was coming up though his window. From his garden.
Severus Apparated down before he was fully awake. His left foot landed on something that rolled underneath, and he fell headlong, almost landing on his nose in a smouldering mess of sticks and old newspapers.
Severus reached back and fished up the object that he’d fallen over. A disposable lighter. A fucking disposable Muggle lighter.
“Where the fuck did this come from?”
“I stole it.” The boy was there, facing him, eyes glittering in terror and triumph. “I stole it! From Mr. Gunderson! I’m not a good boy, I’m not! Not for the Muggles, and not for you! I’m not!”
Snape levered himself to his knees, acutely aware of his nightshirt flapping and his compromised dignity. Could the boy be a pyromaniac? But if so, wouldn’t he be a pyromancer, not stealing the neighbor’s lighter?
What the absolute fuck?!
He closed his mouth on that utterance. The books would recommend a more moderate approach. “Neville, what the bloody hell are you DOING?!”
Wait, that didn’t come out quite right.
Neville didn’t seem to notice his profanity. He was dancing gleefully on the far side of the dying flames. He panted, tearstained, soot-streaked, and laughing all at once, “You’re a liar. A liar! A liar!”
The boy looked down at the fire and glared back up at Snape in triumph. ‘And you’re too late!”
Severus blinked, and looked again at that sorry excuse for a bonfire. Too late for what?
Then he saw that Neville’s hands were burned. Second degree, blisters, and the idiot child was fucking opening the blisters by scrabbling at his sticks, trying to poke up the flames. And his feet, his bare feet-had the boy been kicking at the fire? For the first time Severus saw the reasoning behind Muggle flameproof pyjamas for children; had those gaily flapping train-printed sleeves and legs fucking caught fire!-
Snape was across the bonfire, holding Neville’s wrists immobile. The boy struggled in his hold and cried.
The child’s struggles redoubled hysterically when Snape tried to carry him inside, so Snape finally just summoned the burn salve and gauze and treated the boy on the bench by the door, where the child could keep watch over his dying fire. Which Neville did, resolutely, never once looking at his warder as Snape methodically cleaned and anointed and bandaged every hurt that he could find. Feet, legs, hands, arms, fuck, his face, apparently from one stray flying cinder….
The salve was numbing as well as healing, and it had soporific properties too, in larger dosages. The boy eventually subsided against Snape’s chest.
But still the boy stirred a little restlessly in his arms and muttered, faintly, “Liar.”
“What was it that I lied about, Neville?” Severus finally asked, controlling his voice.
Amongst all the choices.
The boy flinched away faintly but noticeably from Severus’s hands, trying clumsily to pat him comfortingly.
And the child started leaking tears again.
“All right,” Severus said, tightening his grip a little. “All right. Later. You can tell me that part later. But, Neville,” his voice started rising despite his best efforts to moderate it, “What the hell did you think you were doing, starting that fire? You knew you could get hurt.”
The boy stiffened, and suddenly flung himself completely out of Snape’s arms to scrabble in the dirt beside the embers. He snatched something up in his bandaged hands, turned, and hurled it hard at Severus, screaming, “You can’t do it now! I hate you, and you’re a liar, and you can’t do it now! Look!”
Snape Accioed the object automatically at it flew past him. The boy couldn’t throw for toffee. What…?
A tiny ebony box, lid gone, one twisted silver hinge still dangling. Eileen’s casket…!
Neville had destroyed his mother’s casket?! Severus surged to his feet, mouth opening to shout again.
But the boy was facing him with that weird mixture of terror and triumph. Before Severus could draw breath to berate him, Neville shrieked, “You’re a liar! And I hate you! And you CAN’T send me back now!”
Severus remembered, then, what had been in the casket. He recoiled as though at a spell-whiplash, fighting to re-assemble his scattered thoughts.
The boy screamed, hopping on his bandaged feet, ‘You CAN’T give me back now! And I HATE you! And you’re a LIAR!”
Severus wasn’t sure if he’d Apparated or run, but he was holding Neville pinioned in his arms, all pressure taken off those feet. And he wasn’t about to let go, however Neville struggled against his hold. No matter in what terms the child protested.
Severus said, or tried to say, “Neville. What is it that you think I’m lying about?”
He wasn’t sure that it came out quite right. He wasn’t sure, even, whether he’d whispered it, or yelled it, or maybe only thought it.
But the boy heard him, anyhow. At least, he responded. He went limp against Severus and started crying, But Severus could just make out the muffled wail against his chest. “You said that I was your boy now. You did.”
Then Neville stiffened again, and his bandaged fists started beating at Snape’s back in time to his words. “But you lied. You lied. You lied.”
Severus shut his eyes and held the crying child against him. Eventually Neville’s arms and legs moved around to cling like a baby monkey’s.
Severus held him, and finally sighed.
The boy simply didn’t understand his own self interest; that was evident now.
No one in the world could imagine the child better as off the Muggle-born bastard of a half-blood Death Eater than as the coddled scion of wealthy, influential, well-connected Purebloods who’d been indisputably on the right side of the last war.
No one in his world.
And no one could let a child make so foolish and irresponsible a choice.
His arms tightened around the boy, and his eyes squeezed more tightly shut. No one.
The responsible thing to do now, now that Snape understood the real problem, would be to explain to the child more clearly why his staying would be deplorable folly. Explain to the child why he shouldn’t wish it, instead of just assuming that he naturally would not.
And then convince him somehow that he wasn’t being sent back because, yet again, he was unwanted.
The child’s sobs slowly dwindled to snuffling as Severus clutched him. Severus shifted him a little higher, and brushed his unshaven cheek against the top of a head.
No one could be so irresponsible as to let a child make so foolish a choice. No one.
The light had been brightening gradually against his shut eyelids, and his feet were freezing from the dew. Severus finally opened his eyes, sighed again, and shuffled back, numb-footed and shivering, to the bench. He sat down, settling Neville firmly on his lap. The child was still snorting damply into Severus’s nightshirt.
Snape’s own eyes were dry.
Folly.
He said very softly, stroking the sniffling child’s hair, “You understand, Neville, that I’m very angry with you on several counts. First, you did some things that you knew full well you should never have done, whatever the outcome. You stole Mr. Gunderson’s lighter, and you used it to start a fire. You knew that these both were wrong, and that I-that everyone-would be very angry with you just for that, for stealing and doing wrong. And then too, you also knew that starting a fire might hurt you, and it did. I’m very angry at you for that too, for burning yourself so badly, and you knew that I would be.
“And then, your reason for doing all this, Neville, for doing what you knew was wrong, and what certainly would get you into trouble and make me angry with you, and would maybe hurt you-was, you wanted to force me to do something against my will.”
He gave the soft hair a final stroke and set the child on the bench next to him. Neville didn’t want to look up at him, but Severus held him by the shoulders, his thumbs stroking softly, until Neville finally met his eyes despairingly.
“Isn’t that true, Neville? You did all this, got yourself in trouble, hurt yourself, made me angry, because you wanted to force me to give up the idea of giving you back to your birth family? You did all this to destroy the hairs I’d need to make the potion to give you back?”
The boy nodded, transfixed in Severus’s gaze. “So you did all this, really, to try to force ME.” Severus bent lower and let his hands grip more firmly. “And, Neville, no one at all likes to be forced. Did you think me different? Did you think I’d LIKE to be forced to keep you, if I wanted to give you back? Did you?”
The boy gulped; it was clear that that particular aspect of the matter had not previously occurred to him. Severus watched Neville’s dawning look of sick despair.
“There’s another aspect that offends, me, Neville: your disrespect. Oh, not deliberate, on this occasion. I mean only that, on a matter as important as your patrimony, it’s disrespectful to my intelligence that you should imagine that I would keep all the evidence in one place, or give it over to the custody of a child. That would be very foolish, you see. What if something happened to it? Neville, it offends me deeply that you could have imagined me guilty of such lack of foresight.
“And I wasn’t, Neville. When I gave you that casket, it didn’t contain all the hairs I’d originally garnered from you. I gave you some, to reassure you as I thought, but I kept the rest.”
Neville’s face turned to the entrance to the house, and then returned to Severus’s face with growing horror.
Oh, smart boy.
“So you did it all for nothing, Neville. When you destroyed the hairs I gave you, the box I gave you, you didn’t coerce me in any way. Though you tried to. You’re guilty of trying to. I still have the rest of those hairs, Neville. I can still do what I want with them. Do you want to see them? Shall I prove that I still have them?”
Neville shook his head frantically. Severus said, “Well, I think that I should. No one likes being forced, remember, Neville. Or being called a liar. Maybe you don’t believe me. I think that I should prove it.” He waved his wand lazily.
Neville watched the door with fascinated despair, but it was Snape’s open window that the envelope flew out of. Snape caught it, and transfigured the envelope to a small ebony bowl. The tiny dun hairs glinted brightly against the blackness. Neville stared at them, transfixed.
Severus said softly, “Here they are. If I want to send you back, I still can. So now try to stop me. Do your best.”
Another wave, and the bowl was floating in midair before the bench.
With a cry of despair, the boy sprang at it. He rebounded against empty air. Sobbing wildly again, he beat against the invisible dome, trying to batter it down. When that failed, he darted away suddenly, and came back with Mr. Gunderson’s lighter. Snape vanished that abomination from midair, and the boy then grabbed a still-smouldering stick and beat it against the air, sparks flying.
Snape let him flail for a few more seconds, then stood up and said, “Enough! Stop now, Neville, or I’ll put a body-bind on you.”
Neville halted in mid-careem, shocked silent by this threat.
“Now listen to me. Do you understand now, Neville, that you cannot force me to keep you, if I don’t want to? No matter what you do? You cannot force me?”
“I hate you. I hate you!”
“You may hate me, but you can’t make me keep you if I don’t want to. Do you understand that? Answer!”
The boy’s face finally crumpled. “I can’t….”
“I could still give you back, as long as I still have these hairs, right? I could, couldn’t I? And there’s nothing at all that you can do to stop me.”
The boy turned away, shaking, and Severus said sharply, “No, Neville. You need to see this. Look at me!”
He knelt down next to the bowl, raised his wand, and waited for the trembling child to turn. Eventually he repeated softly, “Neville. Look at me.”
Neville finally obeyed, his face smeared with tears and snot. Severus cupped his left hand around the back of the child’s head, holding him so he couldn’t look away. He said softly, “I could still give you back. As long as I had the hairs.”
He exhaled. “And if I wanted to. Watch me, Neville.
“Incendio!”