A little George, a little Lollipops, a whole lotta Snape

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 34860

All these wonderful additions to the Snape back story..it's time to 
trot out my own.

I think, judging from the way Snape's manner of speech changes 
when he talks to Filch, that Snape grew up in a great wizarding 
household  but as the offspring of servants. Perhaps his parents 
were Squibs, or, more romantically, he's the offspring of a secret 
liason between the master of the House and a Squib parent. I 
think Snape taught himself those curses, and no one paid much 
attention to what he was doing since they didn't think he was 
magical. It would help if Snape has some vampire talent for 
getting through locked doors, into libraries perhaps.
I doubt that anyone ever showed him much regard as a child, or 
offered him any affection that didn't come with strings attached.  

Then he gets his Hogwarts letter and is grudgingly invited into 
that gang of Slytherins, who value him first for his knowledge of 
curses and later for his aptitude for potions. It is this last which 
draws Voldemort's interest. We know that Voldemort is *very* 
interested in the Elixir of Life. I'm sure he would like to find a way 
to duplicate it. 

Voldie understands how  Snape feels, having  grown up 
disclassed himself. The  class he was born into thinks he is 
above his station, and the one he aspires to will never entirely 
accept him because he is not pure blood. He dreams of 
sweeping the whole corrupt order away. Voldemort invites Snape 
into the Inner Circle. He gives Snape the strokes he's never had, 
and doesn't think he needs, and Snape becomes a loyal Death 
Eater...for a while.  But...

There has to be something to the Death Eater name. Voldemort 
subsists on Nagini's venom during GoF, and it seems that 
Nagini has to be fed a wizard now and then. We also know that 
Voldemort's earlier reign was marked by disappearances. I think 
Voldemort had a use for those bodies. I think that Voldemort 
promised his followers that they would share eternal life with 
him, neccessary if the wizards are not to die out after they've 
eliminated the Muggles. He offers those who are worthy his 
version of the elixir of life. Then Snape discovers that Voldemort's 
substitute elixir only works because it contains the venom of a 
snake fed on (shudder) wizards.  Snape realizes that Voldemort 
and his Inner Circle are the enemies of wizards as well as 
Muggles, and switches sides.   He offers to spy for Dumbledore 
because he wants revenge on Voldemort, and he wants to make 
sure that Voldie doesn't win, and because he can't see why 
Dumbledore would offer to protect him if he didn't give 
something in return. His reformation, so far as it's taken place, 
comes *after* his defection, when he begins to understand from 
Dumbledore that such things as trust and unconditional love 
actually exist.

The one thing that convinces me above all else that Snape now 
has something besides selfish motivations for what he does is 
Hagrid's behavior. Hagrid is willing to tolerate Snape's treatment 
of Harry, for reasons that he's not yet willing to explain. There has 
to be more to it than following Dumbledore's lead. I have hopes 
that perhaps Hagrid will reveal more of Snape's back story to 
Harry at some time. 

What Snape/Lily explains best is why Voldemort offered to spare 
Lily in the first place. Suppose Snape asked Voldie to spare her, 
not simply because he was still nursing a crush on her, but 
because she herself arranged it! After Lily knows that the  Potters 
are targets, she works out that Snape is a DE and secretly goes 
to him. Can he do anything to save Harry and James? No, but he 
might be able to do something for her...for the usual price. Lily 
agrees...Snape can have whatever is in her power to give if 
Voldemort spares her life. Though he half suspects what she 
means to do, Snape does ask Voldemort for this boon and 
Voldemort, superior and amused,  agrees. It's of no concern to 
Voldie that Snape wants a mudblood, since Snape is himself not 
Pure. Voldemort offers Lily her life (stand aside you stupid girl), 
and *this* is what makes the magic Lily does for Harry potent 
enough to resist the AK curse. Snape, no sentimentalist, bitterly  
resolves to put the whole business out of his mind and does, 
until Harry shows up at Hogwarts. Every time Snape confronts 
Harry, he sees not only his hated rival and his lost love, but the 
scar which reminds him of how Lily died. 

As far as Snape's crack about Hermione's teeth, one of the 
things that makes JKR's characters so real to me is that they're 
unpredictable, just like the rest of us. Sometimes Hermione 
comes through in an emergency. Other times she loses her 
head,  and let's face it, that was one of the times. She's been 
claiming to know all about curses since she was a first year. 
Surely she ought to know that densaugeo can be reversed. 
Instead of asking permission to go to the hospital wing, what 
does she do? She panics, covering her teeth and whimpering,  
acting like, well, Dudley, or Goyle for that matter.  Snape 
administers the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face. Not very 
nice, perhaps, but effective.   We have to remember that 
Hermione isn't just a fourteen or fifteen year old girl, she's a 
fourteen or fifteen year old *witch* and she's expected to keep 
her wits about her. An interesting sidelight here...Hermione and 
Harry both leave the class. Neville is on his own, they're going to 
be testing antidotes, but Neville apparently does fine. Hmmm. 

It's interesting that Neville's boggart Snape goes for its wand. 
Apparently Neville's great fear is that Snape will curse him, even 
though Snape has never threatened anything of the kind, and 
never uses his wand in class at all. Some have speculated that 
Snape was somehow involved in the attack on Neville's parents. 
What if this is so, but Snape came on the scene as a rescuer? 
One or two year old Neville wouldn't neccessarily understand 
that the wizard who burst into his house, wand blazing, had 
come to help. Neville may keep some unconscious memory of 
this which causes him to fear Snape.

Pippin