Potions and Snitches
Snape and Harry Gen Fanfiction Archive

Author's Chapter Notes:
Trigger warning: Sexual violence (Nothing detailed, but it is mentioned and while I don't feel it warrants a rape warning, it might be a trigger.)
Chapter 1
When Severus learnt that the Dark Lord interpreted the prophecy he had overheard as referring to a baby, he felt regret.
Black, hooded cloaks were not evil. Snakes and skulls were not evil. Killing babies, however, was very obviously evil.

It dawned on Severus, then, that Lily had been right, and his new friends were, in fact, not joking around when they talked about murdering muggle-borns.

Regret turned into sheer horror when the Dark Lord announced that he had the potential parents of his prophecied enemy narrowed down to just two couples: The Longbottoms and the Potters.

Severus had long given up on god, gods, goddesses and spirits of nature, but that night, after the Dark Lord had finally let them go home, he prayed to all the deities he did not believe in to spare Lily.

After some thinking, he amended it to Lily, Lily’s child and ... the father of Lily’s child, because Lily would hate him (even more, that was) if by some miracle his prayer was heard and his neglect to mention those two resulted in their death.



Severus did, however, not mention anyone but Lily to Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s stance on the importance of James Potter’s safety was, after all, well known. There was no need to beg the man to keep Potter safe. It could not, however, hurt to give him some incentive to ensure Lily’s safety.

After all, Lily wasn’t some rich pureblood heiress, and regardless how often the old man claimed to have no blood prejudices, Severus had often sensed a certain ... condescendingness when it came to muggleborns, and halfbloods such as himself.


And, miracle or chance, Severus’ prayers were heard. After the Potters were ratted out – the Dark Lord did not disclose by whom, but seemed very amused by the fact – the Dark Lord still decided to go after Alice Longbottom’s baby first.

Two purebloods, he reasoned, would be more likely to produce a son who would be a danger to him.

That was the last decision the Dark Lord made for a long time.

Later, Albus Dumbledore would theorize that what had saved young Neville’s life was the fact that his grandmother had been in the bathroom when she heard the sound of steps in the nursery.

Augusta Longbottom, the theory went, would have been safe if she had hidden away, seeing as the Dark Lord did not know the first thing about child-rearing and would not have known that a baby boy would never be left alone in the house.

The notion that she had sacrificed her own life for her grandson with the words “Over my cold, dead body” was, of course, pure conjecture, but considered to be highly likely by everyone how had known her.


In that Halloween night, however, everyone hailed Neville Longbottom as the Boy Who Lived.


A handful of loyal Death Eaters weren’t happy with the course of events. And the Dark Lord had told Bellatrix Lestrange, whom the trusted above everyone else, the Potters’ address.

By the time Severus learnt about that from a worried Narcissa, the torture had already been going on for a while.

When Albus Dumbledore arrived with reinforcements, Lily and James weren’t conscious anymore.

The following weeks were spent with obsessive researching of potions that might wake someone from a Cruciatus-induced coma, only interrupted by Severus’ trial, of which he would later remember only that Dumbledore had testified in his favour and he owed the man.

Severus and his feverish research relocated to an unused laboratory in Hogwarts, hardly even noticing the change in scenery.

Christmas was approaching when, in an unprecedented act of kindness, the Hogwarts headmaster lent Severus the invisibility cloak that actually belonged to James Potter, so that he might go and pay Lily a visit without being murdered by her other friends.

As it turned out, the precaution would hardly have been necessary. Lily and her husband had been relocated to the permanent ward that morning, and the only friend who still sat with them was Remus Lupin, who looked about as aged and tired as Severus felt.

Severus sat on an uncomfortable looking chair that he hoped no one would wish to claim for themselves anytime soon, and looked at Lily, wondering whether she would hate him for praying that her life be spared.

At least, he told himself, she did not look as though she were in pain. And he would restore her, some day. Hopefully before he started working as Potions Master for Dumbledore next year.


Sleep claimed him, and when he woke, it was dark in the room. What little light there was came from the full moon outside.

The reason he had woken was not the darkness, but the fact that a healer had entered the room.

Using his wand for light, the man made his way over to Lily’s side of the bed, almost brushing Severus in the process.

He pulled the blanket from her sleeping body, then pulled at her nightgown.

Severus tensed. This was not right. Did they let male healers attend to female patients who could no longer refuse such a breach of their privacy? What kind of spell would require a healer to see her – her thighs?

Was it something Lily would have objected to? She was not old-fashioned, her parents had always allowed Severus in her room unsupervised, but this, surely ...

The man hiked up his own robe. His intent was obvious now.

“Stupefy”, Severus hissed.

A different man, a man like Remus Lupin, might have hesitated. Might have thought that surely, the healer could not have been about to do what he obviously was about to do.

Severus had seen enough evil – evil that did not deck itself in dark robes and adorn itself with skulls, ordinary, everyday, muggle evil – to not doubt for a second longer.

Gently, he covered Lily again, gently, he took her arm. Then he grabbed the ankle of the unconscious healer, and activated his emergency portkey.

They appeared in a lovely meadow in the Forbidden Forest, a place where unicorns grazed, just outside the anti-apparition wards.

After covering Lily with his cloak and putting a protection spell on the area, Severus apparated the pervert to a location he knew only from Death Eater meetings. When the man woke and reached for the wand that Severus had taken away from him, it took only three seconds of legilimency to ascertain that yes, Severus had not been mistaken about his intentions. He’d done it to other female patients of the permanent ward.

Even with this knowledge, it was harder than Severus would have thought, to kill someone, directly. Had he not Augusta Longbottom’s blood on his hands already, at the very least?

Slashing the man’s throat with Sectumsempra, that handy little curse that made wounds which looked enough like knife wounds to fool the average fool of an Auror, was harder than it should have been considering Severus knew the curse by heart.

He was not a killer, Severus calmly reflected when he had apparated back to the Forbidden Forest. He just did not have the stomach for it.

With a vanishing charm, the pool of vomit was gone from the forest ground.

Severus summoned a stretcher for Lily, then covered her with the invisibility cloak before he used a spell that would make the stretcher float after him.

He had been unforgivably naive in assuming St. Mungo’s would keep the patients safe, somehow, either by not allowing male healers to tend to female patients, or by making them swear unbreakable vows.

At this point in his life, he knew better than to assume that anyone would have believed him in the first place, knew better even than to assume that safety precautions would be taken to protect female patients.


After all, it had not been the first time, had it? The man had worked there for quite a while, and someone was bound to have noticed.

Oh, he could all too well imagine. The young assistant healer, too enthusiastic for her own good, returning after hours to read a story to her favourite patient, perhaps that young girl in the bed at the door ...

Would she dare to report that the senior healer, the one who held all the power over her future career, had raped a patient?
Would she be heard, or would she be fired, and everything hushed up?

Just as the headmaster of Hogwarts hushed up werewolf attacks ...

Severus shuddered, and even though the moon was full, it was not out of fear for himself.

“You are safe now”, he whispered, even though the Daily Prophet claimed the Potters were ‘like vegetables’ and couldn’t see, hear or feel a thing.“You are safe, Lily. I will not let them harm you again.”


Had that man raped her before? Severus knew he could never be sure that it had not happened. If he had delved deeper into the man’s mind ... but he didn’t have the stomach for killing, and he certainly had not the stomach to witness someone raping his dearest friend. Witnessing what the ‘healer’ had done to that poor girl in the bed had been bad enough.


He walked to his quarters, deep in the dank dungeons, and entered the icy cold bedroom. A warming charm would be needed, he decided as he lowered Lily onto the beautiful four-poster bed with the Slytherin-green bedclothes.

As he spread the duvet over her, it occurred to him that, perhaps, it had not been the wisest course of action to take her with him. In the moment, it had made sense – taking first the man and then Lily would be seen as a series of attacks, while taking both at the same time might get blamed on the man – but while Severus was rather good at disguising criminal activities, he was not good at taking care of a comatose person.

There was nothing wrong with her body, at least according to the newspapers and Dumbledore, she could breathe on her own, but obvously, she couldn’t eat.
She couldn’t wash herself.

And she certainly wouldn’t want Severus to wash her.

No, he needed help. But who? Which of her female friends would ... understand, understand in the same visceral way Severus did, that St. Mungo’s could not be trusted to do right by Lily in the future?

He could not think of any. Lily had told him about her female friends, and she had also bemoaned the fact that none of them really understood her. ‘Not like you’.
A tear formed in the corner of his eye, and Severus shook his head. Enough of those fruitless thoughts.

Back to the problem at hand. Lily didn’t have any friends he could rely on. There was, of course, her sister ... no, Petunia would never take Lily into her nice, ordinary, witch-free home that she had worked so hard to acquire.

Moreover, Petunia would likely not believe that an institution like a hospital could do any wrong.

If only Mrs. and Mr. Evans hadn’t been in that car accident ... Severus sighed. That was no use now.


Perhaps, if he told Dumbledore ... no. Intuitively, Severus knew that was not a good idea. Unless he lied. He could make up some tale about the healer being a Death Eater intending to murder Lily. ‘There is no knowing how many spies the Dark Lord has in St. Mungo’s’ he could say ...

That might work. But then there was the problem of explaining why he had taken Lily and not James. Dumbledore would be angry for endangering James.

Dumbledore might also point out that nothing had happened as of yet ...

Perhaps some tale about slow poisoning?

The truth ... no, the truth would not work. He just knew. The pub where Tobias Snape had wasted away his money appeared before Severus’ inner eye. The regulars, shaking their heads at ‘this horrible monster’ who had raped and murdered a young woman, all the while they whistled after the barmaid, who couldn’t have been more than 17 years old, if that, stared at her breasts and slapped her bottom if she didn’t manage to dodge their dirty paws fast enough.

Severus remembered the first barmaid, her wheat-coloured plait and high-buttoned blouse. She had been kind to him, sent him back home and had gone to Tobias’ table herself to tell him his wife wanted him home, sparing Severus a lot of his fathers’s anger.

No, molesting women was just fine with the average man, as long as no one got killed.

Severus decided to postpone the decision until the morning.

A good night’s sleep would certainly help, much as he loathed to admit it. The headmaster would not enter his bedroom, so Lily was both safe and secret there.

He settled on the couch in his living room with one of the books he had used for research. Closing his eyes, he let the book slip out of his hands until it hit the floor with a soft noise. Attention to detail was, after all, essential for a good deception.

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