RP: Happy Birthday To Me Who: Severus Snape Where: Hogwarts - Headmaster's Office, and Grounds When: Sunrise: Saturday, 9th January 2025 Rating/Warnings: Summary: Snape has a private moment, alone with himself.
Snape's new bedroom benefited from a wealth of natural light, but at this time of the year and this far north, sunrise came late. Snape was already up, bathed and dressed by the time the first hints of dawn were tinting the eastern sky with delicate shades of pink. On the way out of the room, he paused by the window, as he always did: brow pressed to the glass, gazing out.
After a lifetime entombed - in grinding Muggle poverty, or in the ground with nothing but fake window charms for solace - he didn't think he'd ever get tired of the view: the sense of space and freedom, calling to him, as it did to anything that could fly.
He Apparated out of his rooms, into his office. For once, instead of starting into his work immediately, he took a moment to look around himself, at the walls crowded with portraits. At the portrait of Albus, frozen and snoozing.
At his own portrait.
It was a memento mori: wizarding portraits could only be painted after their subjects were dead. Most men would have taken down such a potent reminder of their own mortality; Snape left his hanging in pride of place.
The portraits of Hogwarts' Headmasters were an even deeper magic than normal wizarding portraits: not painted by an artist but called into existence by the castle's magic, instantaneously upon the Headmaster's death, in every case for a thousand years.
Every case but his. The castle had told him, in memories tinged with regret, of how it had condemned him as a traitor after his death, denied him any memorial. Until Harry had come to it, and explained.
His portrait had, presumably, been animated, but he'd never seen it so. It was as frozen now as it had been every other time he'd seen it: gazing with a furious, Legilimentic intentness out of its frame, straight at the viewer. His image was portrayed in a researcher's dream of a laboratory: a perfection of apparatus, supplies and reference works that he'd taken ironic pleasure in re-creating in reality, deep under the castle's most outflung wing.
In all of wizarding history, only returnees could possibly gaze, as he was, with living eyes upon their own portraits.
On this, the dawn of his thirty-ninth year of life, his gaze searched every nuance of that painted, frozen gaze.
May the day you awaken be long delayed, my shade.
With that thought, he gave the image an ironic nod of farewell, and slipped as easily as a serpent through the thorn-tangle of defenses that kept all others from apparating within Hogwarts' grounds.
He appeared in a wide, grassy meadow. To one side loomed the white marble box of Dumbledore's tomb, but he spared it not a glance.
Before him was a severely simple headstone, in jet-black granite. Its mirror-smooth face was broken only by a brief inscription:
SEVERUS TOBIAS SNAPE 9 JANUARY 1960 2 MAY 1998
If sharing an office with his portrait was strange, standing over his own, occupied grave was a situation so rife with irony it was all he could do not to laugh aloud. Especially since, as someone familiar with the most arcane uses of human remains, he could only begin to speculate on the twisted magics that could be performed by a Dark Artist, upon his own corpse.
He looked down at the grass at his feet, picturing the body beneath: after more than a quarter of a century in the earth, surely nothing was left but a scarecrow sprawl of spindly bones.
A smile - as strangely triumphant as Snape himself - twisted its way across his gaunt face, echoing the smile his skull surely wore.