“So let not this current life deceive you.”

-Surah Fatir | Verse 5


Severus recalled the day Lily mentioned something called church. Tobias Snape was not a religious man and the wizarding community, though they had their own beliefs as to deities and the like, did not practice in the same way muggles did. Sequestered away in his stifling home, his proud mother unwilling to send him to muggle school and his father beating away the abnormalities, Severus knew very little about what Lily apparently was quite excited about.

He’d patiently listened as she explained how most Sundays she would get dressed in a pretty dress, an image he spent many hours imagining, and go to a building with a spire, painted white, and containing rows and rows of benches. At the front someone talked about God, a figure Severus best associated with Merlin or maybe magic itself, and about being kind and about being good. She’d told him that this God listened to anyone who chose to speak to Him and loved everyone; that this God helped people.

Poor, dear, quixotic Lily, Severus had thought, but somehow a small flame of hunger burned in him at the thought of a higher power who would give you aid if you so chose to implore.

Lily had then clapped her hands in glee at some sudden idea. She was going to show him how to pray. His nose scrunched up and his so far patient humouring of the girl started to see its end. However she just smiled, placed her hand in his and insisted. His ill-humour was immediately dispelled.

Severus allowed Lily to order him to mimic her, kneeling in the grass as she did, clasping his hands as she did, and bowing his head as she did. He however kept a furtive eye on her while Lily fully committed herself to the position. He watched her eyes clench shut, lovely red hair falling like a curtain over her one shoulder. Her freckled nose came low enough to nearly brush her joined hands.

Then Lily spoke, voice as it ever was, a sweet cadence which took Severus in. She asked this God to protect the birdies, the flowers, the little animals, to take care of her Severus --for he was her Severus at this time-- and to make people not be angry, to not hate, and to forgive. She ended with saying that she didn’t need anything, but she hoped He would be okay with fulfilling some of her requests.

Severus stared, something about it all confused him, a part of it hurt. Didn’t Lily know that you couldn’t just ask for something? Life didn’t care, this God surely didn’t care. His mind retreated to memories of his mother and father, of all he’d suffered in his short life and bitterness welled. But then Lily was smiling at him, her hand finding his again as it so often did to take him to play.

Prayer stayed on his mind after that, a constant curiosity planted by Lily.

It came to fruit a week later. Tobias was screaming again, Severus had smelled the alcohol first and he’d clenched his hands into fists and struggled to evoke a face clear of either guilt or fear. The man’s words, screamed, were tucked away into memory and Severus tried to keep a happy moment in mind, he thought of Lily. Eileen stood by, pale, herself afraid.

Later, body bruised and the taste of blood lingering in his mouth, Severus entered his bedroom and felt the tears rise unbidden as they so often did. He hated Tobias, he craved the man’s love; he was disgusted by his mother’s impotence, he so longed for her tender caresses. The terrible feeling of helplessness at his life, at his pain and all he could not change fell over him. The mask he’d built so meticulously fell and he collapsed to his knees and clutched at himself, seeking his lack from the very place that had nothing to give.

He thought of Lily, of her silly notion of prayers, of some figure who loved him even though they didn’t know him. But Lily had said that God knew all. Severus’ need drove him to what he thought was foolishness.

Unbending, he recalled Lily’s motions, placing his trembling hands together and trying to straighten his back enough to mimic his memory of Lily.

“God,” Severus whispered, voice trembling, a strange mixture of embarrassed and desperate.

“Please, please,” he whispered, words in his heart going unvoiced as tears fell.

“Please change my dad, help my mom, please don’t let me-” he cut off, remembering how Lily had asked for nothing for herself.

The sound of drunken footsteps in the hallway had him tensing. He held still, breath stopped, until the footsteps ended with a door slamming shut.

He continued his prayer silently, heart aching for relief, his unspoken words too timid to ask for anything for himself, instead asking for the happiness of his parents.

Severus fell asleep with a tiny, appropriately childish hope in his heart, maybe the last he could recall ever having.

He woke to the sounds of his parents screaming down below, of his blackened eye feeling swollen, his back aching, his heart as ever starved for love as it usually was, and the room around him bleak and dark. His little hope, no longer appropriately childish, died.


XxX


Harry heard the phrase church a decent amount because Aunt Petunia would say that Mrs. so and so said such and such about what’s-their-name during service, however Aunt Petunia only ever went once a month and it was only to hear gossip or show off. She probably would’ve attended more often, however she wasn’t particularly interested in even a pretended sense of self-righteous bearing that many people found as a means of justification at places considered holy, Vernon also wasn’t religious in the slightest while Dudley hated attending from the moment he was old enough to cry.

Harry went once, a kind man had taught the children, Aunt Petunia lingering around the other women. He’d taught Harry and the other children about Christ and how he loved all the little children and hated to see them suffer. He taught them that Christ liked it when children behaved and were good. He taught them how to pray and in the end had given them all some candy before sending them back to their parents. Harry liked church, but after that visit Aunt Petunia never allowed him to return.

Harry didn’t think much about what the teacher had talked about, every once in a while thinking wistfully of that person Christ who loved all little children, no matter how freaky.

It wasn’t until several months later that he thought of it.

Aunt Marge had cancelled her visit and Uncle Vernon was in a foul mood. Aunt Petunia had already made the dessert, an extravagant mousse cake, and was irritated by its ‘waste’. Harry had been tired and burned the bacon. After his head met a frying pan, he had attempted to complete his first chore: cleaning the stove. His head hurt and he messed something up, forgetting to turn the oven setting off and he’d opened it, body registering the wafts of heat but his mind unable to respond. He burned his left hand, badly. Aunt Petunia slapped him and sent him to his cupboard where dinner rights were revoked and he was locked into darkness.

He cried first, until the pain faded to a constant throb. His little arm clutched to his chest, he wondered why life had to hurt so much sometimes. Vernon had yelled at him a little before casting him in, words that tore Harry up, words like ‘bad’, ‘freaky’, and ‘unwanted’.

His mind turned to the church lesson, the man --he forgot his name now-- who loved all children. The teacher had said that if you wanted to speak to Him, all you had to do was --what was it?-- that’s right, pray. Harry felt a small hope blossom in his chest. It stuttered though as he remembered how the teacher had said that the man wanted children to be good. Harry was not good.

Still, maybe the man would still listen, so Harry shuffled into a kneeling position, he tried to press his hands together like the teacher had shown, but it was impossible with his injury. Settling for an awkward press of his left wrist against his right hand he squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head.

“Please, please,” Harry said, thinking of the word family and what it could mean and wishing it didn't mean something else to him.

“I'm sorry for being bad, and freaky, and if I'm good, maybe, maybe-” Harry licked his cracked lips and fumbled for words.

Tears came and he felt absolutely lost. Maybe the man, the nice man who loved all children, would find him. Harry kept his cries silent and stayed in his position, words racing through his mind since silence was the only sound tolerated by his relatives.

He fell asleep this way, slumped over awkwardly with his left hand tucked to his chest, a small hope chirping weakly in his heart.

Harry woke the next morning to his Aunt's shrill voice, to a few harsh words and a dirty strip of a shirt for his hand. Harry felt his little hope flutter a mortal wing in him and promptly fade away. Boys like him did not have prayers answered.


XxX


Many years later, in a dark room that smelled like lake water and was always chilled, Severus spent his last moments. Lily's eyes met his for a last time and he saw in them an implacable kindness, a strange erstwhile answer to a prayer said many many years ago. His last deed was on a weak thought of hope. His last breath with the thought of peace long promised to him. Maybe, Tobias and Eileen had found happiness many years ago in the soft arms now welcoming him; Death a benevolent safekeeper.


XxX

Many years later Harry sat in a pew with his perplexed but thoroughly amused and curious wife. She was pregnant and her belly rounded by six months. A choir was singing a song so faintly familiar that Harry realized, as he placed his arm around his wife, that words he'd spoken in his youth in silence of a cupboard had been answered.

The chorus rose, snow sprinkled outside, and Harry felt tears sting his eyes.