Severus Snape, the super long app.

[bestunrevealed]

Winter wears a gown of white, ice crystals in her hair,
She walks among the world of men, but leaves them unaware.
They say she longs for summer, something she can never know.
They say she dreams of something more than neverending snow.

Summer wears a crown of gold, his fingers stained with green,
He walks among the world of men, where he is never seen.
They say he longs for winter, for the silence and the frost.
They say he dreams of skin like snow, they say that he is lost.

The summer and the winter are the two sides of the coin,
Meeting only in the moments that a heartbeat can purloin,
They say that they are lovers, like amazement and the star.
They say that they are proof that we are only what we are.

The Player
User Name/Nick: murderofcrows
User LJ: NA
AIM/IM: NA
E-mail: storytelling.crow@gmail.com
Other Characters: Tiffany Aching.

The Character
Character Name: Severus Snape
Character Journal: bestunrevealed
Canon: Harry Potter
Age: 38
From When?: Right before Nagini's poison and bloodloss kill him toward the end of Deathly Hallows.

Abilities/Powers: Severus Snape is a wizard of the Harry Potter variety, and worse, he is a (arguably former) Dark Wizard of some power who was the right hand of Lord Voldemort and knew many of the dark lord's secret magics and blacker rituals.

The generic magic - transfiguration, flying on brooms, and 'vagueness and latin' used to cast spells that move objects, conjure items, transform items from other items and so forth which is well documented in Harry Potter is a catch all for useful spells that handle mundane tasks. There's a spell to clean places, a spell to repair things, a spell for - well, just about everything, quite frankly, in the Harry Potter universe. If there's even a vague analogy to a tool or technology, magic can likely do it. Need to make a phone call? Use flue powder to speak from fire place to fire place with someone else whose 'flue address' you know, and so forth.

To elaborate on every possible spell would take forever, and since we have other HP canon in the Wood, we're not going for the purpose of this application. Instead, we're going to focus on what set Snape apart from most wizards. Beyond 'wand waving frippery' which Snape mostly disdains, Snape has five areas of expertise; Potion Mastery, Duelling, Legilimency and Occlumency, and Dark Magic.

Potion Mastery covers the fact that there are few better then Severus Snape in the creation of magical draughts, potions, liquors, ointments or other brews. Much like the 'vagueness and Latin' that accompanies the wand-based magic, there is really no limit given to the things that Snape can do, IF he has the proper time, equipment and ingredients requires. He can create potions that heal, harm transform, confuse, kill or create odd or humorous effect. However, each potion must be brewed in a precise manner, from the right cauldron type, size, ingredients, right down to the type of stirrer used. While some of this will be easy to find - most of it won't be (see power limitations). Some potions take months of proper care to brew - one wrong move, one stirring missed, and the potion will be ruined. If Snape cannot maintain that sort of schedule, many of his most advanced brews will never see creation in the wood (Luck, Transfiguration, etc). Even veritaserum takes a month to properly create.

Duelling covers a very specific set of wand-based magic; attack and defense. Snape is a master duellist, well known for his combat reflexes and swift defense. He is a master of single combat, but is no slouch in a wizardly 'fire fight', either. He is able to create sheilds on the fly, without having to use a vocal or wand component, and is well versed in a variety of hexes and curses that go from humiliating to debilitating, from damaging to deadly. He is not and never has been a wizard to be trifled with.

Legilimency and Occulumency are twin arts; one penetrates the mind and the other occludes it. Snape is a master of both these magics, and they were invaluable during his time as a spy against the most powerful dark wizards to ever live. It is said that his 'eyes that see right through you', often noted by students that were on the receiving end of his investigative skills were not aware that their minds were being read, but during very deep probes - such as his 'teaching' experiments with Harry during duels - can be felt and experienced by the person probed if he is being 'blunt' about it - it's a violating and unhappy experience for the probed.

Occulmency, it's twins, create shields, fogs of misdirection, fake thoughts and feelings; a legilmens can be fed false information, denied important information (It's simply 'not there' or they 'don't know'). Snape is a greater occulumens then he is a legilimens, but that's like saying he can compose slightly better symphonies then he can opera. They have roots in the same art, and only a fellow master would see where his legilimency is not quite as fantastic in scope as his occulumency. (Like the only better legilimens or occulumens then either Voldemort or Snape; Albus Dumbledore.)

When it comes to Dark Magic, this covers Unforgivable Curses (Mind Control, Agony, and Death, in sum up), rituals that do terrible and unspeakable things (drinking unicorn blood for health, etc) as well as strange magics like flight without a broom. As 'reformed' as Snape is, his expertise here is more 'academic' then practical, as he's not about to cut off anybody's hands to rebuild his body or health. Oh, he'll fly without a broom if he must, but that's one of the more benign magics that Snape learned from Voldemort, and even that's weird for Snape, and that's saying something.

Power Limitations: First off, without ingredients and a lab, his potion making is crippled. This is a major blow for Snape, both on a power scale level and psychologically (he loves his craft and to be denied it will be quite the punishment) and will have to be rebuilt over time, or he will have to find a patron that is willing to supply him with what he needs, or do good deeds for the giving tree, or other plot item. Either way, he will be crippled in his usefulness to the survivors in the wood at large until this ability is restored to him, and it will be something he seeks with maddening persistence. He will be able to start by gathering herbs and such items from the Wood itself, but equipment will be much harder to come by and so he will be very, very limited in what he can brew.

In turn, he will have an average of 1 in 15 spell failure rate, as the rest of the Harry Potter cast. Apparition will not work as intended - if he attempts any places outside the Wood, he's liable to end up someplace he doesn't want to be, but knowing what he has - or doesn't have to get back to.

Inventory Black robes (under shirt, over shirt, slacks, socks, shoes, cloak), wand (birch, dragon heartstring core, 13”), a couple of sickles in his pocket, the letter with Lily's love on it and a wizarding photograph of Lily Evans (worn and very old), one bezoar in a pocket.

Personality:

Severus Snape is a horrible, maladjusted misanthrope who was created by a cycle of abuse, exploited by a terrorist organization, then exploited again by a counter terrorist organization who has never, in his entire life, had anybody really and truly love him. Worst thing is, at the end of the life, he knows this - there is no other reason that he would make a last ditch attempt to be understood by a boy he knew would understand, partially, where he came from, and partially, where he had gone wrong.

To start, we cover the basics: Snape came from a home that was riddled with abuse that mirrored Harry Potter's misery, and in turn, also mirrors Voldemort. They are a succession of characters that go from “saved from the cycle” (Harry), to “not enough action was taken to prevent cycle from continuing” (Snape) and, “Completely lost in the cycle, perpetrator of terrible abuses, exploiter and tyrant” (Voldemort).

Snape's family was poor. Typical of mill families at the time, they shared housing with migrant workers, and there was no privacy, and certainly, no compassion or community. Snape was well aware that his father's rage was known to the people around him, and they did nothing. This taught him to rely only on himself. Couple this with his mother's enabling of his darker urges and refusal to act to protect herself or her son out of fear of being alone, or being shamed returning to the wizarding community a divorcee with a half-blood child, and we have some issues just waiting to spring forth. With fear of physical contact due to association with pain, with small infractions being punished with great rage, we have a foundation for Snape's mad temper and love of doling out punishment with detentions and cruelty or simple pettiness (10 points from Gryffindor for being a know-it-all) but the illusion of his self control - he is a physically restrained man, but only just.

Potion Making is an extension of both his need for control and his need for restraint - also, creation of something of worth that is tangible. Teaching would never fulfill him because he could never control his students enough. Oh, he had his favorites and he showered his House with favor, but it was never going to be enough for him. Potion Making fulfills that urge to create, control, and dispense -- it's precise. It's scientific. But it's making something of worth, giving the creator worth in the mean time. This is one of the few things that makes Severus Snape feel genuinely good about himself. In his lab, he is still controlling and domineering, but he's much calmer and peaceful, focused and contained. It allows him something very important: total control over something, and something useful coming out of that control.

Snape enjoys being in control and he loves power for it's own sake. He was never empowered as a child or youth, and he was constantly frustrated that his origins, bloodline, house and such seemed to limit him or define what he could be, instead of his own work or will. Slytherin's defining trait is ambition, but yet, Snape saw laurels passed to the Gryffindor boys because of luck of family, birth, good looks and other circumstances, not the work they put in at trying to succeed despite his low birth, lack of money, and other disadvantages. This inequality drove him to distraction and so his campaign of revenge while they bullied those different from themselves (not just Snape, but he made himself such an attractive target...) and continued Snape's pattern of powerlessness and kept him trapped in a cycle he did not know how to free himself from.

This need for empowerment made him the perfect recruit for a terrorist organization, and that's precisely what the Death Eaters were. They preyed on his need for a group to belong to, but also a group he could rise over and lead through his own 'merit' and 'skill'. He did differentiate himself from the Crabbe and Goyle level thugs of the group, and quickly rose through the ranks. Like most mid-to-high level terrorists, however, Snape didn't care about it's ideology. He didn't care about blood purity because his was as muddy as the next half-blood. It was never about race or wizard lines for Severus. It was about what the Death Eaters could promise him: standing in the new wizard order, respect, and everything that was due his efforts and work. Of course he bent over backwards for them and towed the party line. It validated his hate of his father, and made him despise his weak mother, and he swallowed their hook and they had him. In retrospect he knows himself to be a fool for believing any of it.

One should note that his rising star among the Death Eaters meant that Snape didn't really have to get his hands dirty with wet work. Oh, he tortmented a muggle here or there, and he most certainly killed his father himself (but who can really blame him there?) as an initiation to the group, but other then that, Snape worked mostly in an organizational capacity; magical research, spying on people, and the like. The murder and the thuggery was left to lower-level troops and 'true fanatics' that couldn't be trusted with more delicate operations. This doesn't mean Snape's hands are clean, it simply means that he didn't spend his Death Eater days hip-deep in exploded Muggle remains anymore then Voldemort did. This would factor in to his desire to do as Lucius and Narcissa asked and protect Draco from the worst realities of the Death Eaters, especially when it came to stay at their home in their later lives.

It was only the dream of a better tomorrow, of being a better man with a real family and the person who represented it all to him, that broke the hold the promises of the Death Eaters had on him. Lily Evans was a childhood dream as much as she was a person for Snape - a witch from a family that loved her despite that they had no magic, and didn't hold her at arms' lengths. She was peripherally aware of what was going on at the Snape household, but she was never, ever taken to Spinner's End, never taken to where Snape was weak, powerless and hated. He went to her home, his family welcomed him, and he loved them with all his heart for it. It was his first taste of things that could be different, that they could be RIGHT and GOOD and NOBLE and more importantly, that those weren't just words, they were REAL.

When the living embodiment of that dream was threatened, Severus turned on a dime; he betrayed everyone and anyone to keep Lily safe. HE didn't care who he had to sell out, that dream of another time and place, that promise of a life that could never be his, he couldn't let it die. But he did. Despite his best efforts on all sides of the conflict, Snape couldn't save the woman he loved or the dream she represented. It all went to hell, and he was the architect of his own damnation. Worse, he knew it.

Even worse, Dumbledore knew it and played him like a harp from hell - Snape, broken though he might be by Lily's death, could still be useful. Dumbledore's counter-terrorist organization still used some of the same tactics of the other, and instead of promising power and respect, this time he offered a more tenuous and harder to attain item: Absolution for his sins against Lily Evans through her son, Harry Potter. However, the full transference of love from one to the other couldn't happen. James was to present in the boy. In his attitude, his appearance. Snape always wondered if he could not have protected her better if he were in James' place, even if he knew logically she had never loved him like that and likely, no one ever would. But the result as still the same: he transferred his total loyalty from Voldemort to his new guiding father-figure, Dumbledore.

He couldn't love the boy, but he could keep his promise. This wore on over time, and the work continued and Snape felt the weight of failure on his shoulders. He was burying more then he was saving and expressed his frustration to his only 'friend' and confidant, Dumbledore himself. Much as he went to Voldemort for validation of his hate of his father and to replace him, he turned to Dumbledore for the same reason; a father figure to validate and care for him. It did not stop him from caring for the man as he needed to place some emotional anchors somewhere, as the work was not enough to keep him from going emotionally adrift, but he would always suspect the other's feelings to be false. Snape is not trusting - he is suspicious to a fault, and lives by the 'fool me once, shame on me - but I'll make sure you never, ever try it again' line of thinking. There is no room for 'fool me twice', not ever.

Snape is not without compassion or empathy - you can't be cruel without knowing what it is yourself to be hurt - but it is buried so deep that it may as well be lost. He has been taught that the only people who are going help you is “me, myself, and I” and so he expects others to do the same. Kindness comes at a price for him - nobody will love him for who he is, because he knows that he is a ruin of a man and not worth much. He is capable of love, in a stunted sort of way - he loved Lily, certainly, and one could argue that he loved Draco in a familial sort of way, but Snape's love is a heavy cross to bear. It is a dangerous thing; he can be gentle, loyal and kind to a point, but he takes rebuke seriously and seeks to control those relationships as he does any other, which is why the mentor-student relationship with Draco was 'safe' for him to indulge in. It's not something he can help; manipulation is what he knows - even those who said they cared, like Dumbledore, manipulated Snape, and so he returns the favor. Lily is really the only exception... and well, one sees how THAT turned out.

His self-evaluation is shit; in the years since leaving the Snape household and setting himself up with Hogwarts, he may have abandoned second-hand clothing, but he still lives in a pit of a house, he still doesn't keep very clean, and he cannot erase the marks that poor nutrition and lack of medical and dental care left on him from the years before. He knows that everyone can see that he is the poor boy from Manchester in nicer clothes, and he struggles to relate the reality of his life (some respect, still no love, alone by choice) to the self-image of that weak, miserable person (deserves none of those things, etc). In the past this turned into petty attempts at destroying or hurting anyone who knew him from those days (Remus Lupin) or people he blamed for part of his problems (Sirius Black), but in the end, he knew the truth: he was not a good person, but he wished he could have been, or at least, could have been better.

However, for all that Snape is a control freak who does not understand love or loving others, he does have a few good traits. Once his loyalty is attained, he would walk through hell barefoot for those who had it. He is self-sacrificing when called upon, and he truly does CARE for people in his warped, emotionally stunted way even if he has no real healthy way of showing it. When Order members and their families began to suffer and die, he feels guilt and shame -- wondering what else he could have done, what lie he could have told or what misdirection he could have planted to keep those people alive are. Gone is the man who would have left James Potter die if Lily Evans would live in exchange -- he HAS grown as a person, like a stunted plant finally allowed a little sunshine -- but it slow and agonizing process. He is a private man, fearful of vulnerability, be he allowed himself a tenuous friendship with Albus Dumbledore, though he was aware that he was being played during the majority of their friendship, he always did as he was asked -- even to the point of killing his only friend, and leaving himself alone with the fullness of Dumbledore's plans, being the only person left to enact them.

Maybe, in the Wood, he will have the chance to grow into a good man. It's a slim chance, with the heaps of damage that render Severus Snape a jumbled bag of self-loathing neurosis and tenuous attempts at being a decent human being, but it's a chance all the same. However, with his need to control, his fears of being manipulated and exploited again, and his inability to really trust or depend on others, or accept and give love without a price or condition on it will greatly hinder him and make him a delicious target for the Wood's dangers.

History: Severus Snape is a horrible person.

However, like most horrible people, he had a hand in getting from 'innocent child' into 'not quite a complete monster'. We'll start at the root of the problem: an abusive household.

Tobias Snape was a man who beat his wife and child, locked his child in the basement as punishment, told him he was a freak like his freak wife, and did things like drank heavily, had a hard time holding a job, and resented that his wife had magical power but couldn't make all their troubles go away, and resented that his son was just like her in that respect, a freakish wizard that couldn't just whip up a pile of gold or otherwise make them live like kings. They were very poor, shared a home with other migrant factory workers, and shared a communal bath, leading a skittish and fearful boy to have a problem with hygiene as he grew older.

Spinner's End was in the Manchester miller's district; the very epitome of the 'wrong side of the tracks'. Rife with crime and poverty, where migrant workers from all over the poor of Europe came to earn a relatively honest dollar. Tobias Snape had trouble staying in work, but the dole was too much for his pride, and so he would get work, eventually screw it up with his bad temper and be demoted and fired, spend some time on welfare, and rinse and repeat this cycle year after year.

Snape lived in this unstable home his entire life. For the first seven years he had no friends - children may have come and went with other migrant families, but nobody lasted or stayed. His only constant was that his father was a tyrant and his mother was a coward. His father despised him and his mother loved him as much as she could when she wasn't crying in a corner holding her son.

But she prepared him for life the best way she could. She knew the violence in his home and the violence of the street would eventually reach him, and so she taught him every mean trick she knew in the wizarding book. She taught him no one was going to look after him BUT him, and this became a truism for Snape's life. Nobody was going to save him. Nobody was going to love him but his mother, and she wouldn't even do that very well. She wouldn't leave Tobias, because she was afraid of the shame of being a witch with a half-blood child on the run from a Muggle husband, and she was afraid she had no place to go. The Princes weren't a well placed Pureblood family, but even they had pride and the Snapes were cut off from the family due to tensions centered around Tobias.

Then he met Lily Evans and he wanted what she had. He wanted her wonder and her joy and her family. He wanted her love, in it's way, but mostly he wanted what she represented: something better then what he had. Something better then Spinner's End. A place where families fought, but loved each other at the end of the day and resolved their problems without anybody screaming or being hit. A place where dinner wasn't cold beans out of a can. A place where people could laugh and smile without it being edged with bitterness and fear. She was as much a symbol of everything he could have, but didn't, as she was a person.

However, the cycle continued with Snape. He was already set in it - his father was an abuser, and he too wanted to take power and status like his father did, not understanding that it was that greed that was the root of their problems, not the rage and frustration that came from lack of fruition of Tobias' grand plans. He learned other lessons from his father at home as well. As he grew up he was prone to 'accidental' magical lash outs - at Petunia, at animals that bothered him, and so forth. Had his story gone one way instead of the other, Snape could have truly been a sociopath in the making.

But he wasn't. He still felt guilt. He still managed love, if a very greedy, unhappy one. He still wanted things to be right and good, and he knew that there could be BETTER things than Tobias Snape and his angry little home in Spinner's End. What he didn't know what how to step outside that cycle and attain it.

There might have been opportunity during his schooling; however, there were opposite forces at work. Snape could have been prevented by a caring school master, perhaps, from becoming another one of Voldemort's supporters, but - hey, who cares about those Slytherin kids? There was also the trouble of double standards. There was Snape and the Slytherin children, always in trouble, and then there were the Gryffindor boys that sorted the same year he did: James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew. The first two were bullies in the first right-- but also handsome, good at sports, and had everything handed to them on a platter, where Snape got nothing but disdain, even from some of the members of his own house. The latter two were their hanger-on pals, carried by the popularity of James and Sirius, who were flagrent in abusing it -- and abusing Snape. It also didn't help that James wanted what Snape wanted: Lily Evans. That only boiled the hate and kept it as a bubbling froth.

The hatred was destined; as they tormented him, he tormented them - but it was regularly four against one, and Snape often came out on the losing end, until he started running with a pack of his own friends... and that started causing problems with Lily, who was starting to notice that Snape's 'friends' within his House were much like James' - just as mean. Sometimes, worse. She wasn't sure she could know him anymore, as they got older and he became less comfortable with her family and she became less comfortable with who else he was seeing over the summer - holidays with the Malfoys? Who'd've thought...

It would be a lie to say he was okay with that. He wasn't. He wanted that proverbial cake and to eat it too. But she made the choice for him when he let that dirty 'Mudblood' word drop, that blood insult, racist and terrible - and that was that. They were done. Severus Snape created his own damnation with one bloody slip of the tongue and he would rue the day forever, to the point that he would someday hide that terrible memory from all who might reach it.

To complicate matters, the last year at school, Snape would be tricked by Sirius Black -- who would have, without guilt, let Snape go to 'find' Remus Lupin in his werewolf state in the full moon, to be killed at best, or worse, mangled and infected with lycanthropy -- and had his life saved by James Potter. He would never believe it was for any other reason than to protect his friends, not his life -he could never credit James with much forethought and he couldn't understand any level of basic compassion directed at him.

So there as nothing to stop him from sinking into the quagmire of the Death Eaters after graduation. He remained fast friends with the Malfoy's who tolerated his low blood status for his power and standing with the Dark Lord; he and Lucius were 'friendly' rivals for Voldemort's attention and it galled Lucius to no end that a half-blood attained a higher standing then his pureblooded Malfoy self, because he had no one else. No teacher that cared. No friends would try to save him. They were all marching straight tp hell with him. Worse yet, he was talented, powerful and full of hate that could be aimed like a heat seeking missile. Voldemort used him well as a torturer and interrogator and spy.

It was the last thing that would get him into trouble. HE heard the the true prophecy. HE reported it to Voldemort. HE signed, by his own clumsy hand, the death warrant for the Potters and consigned Neville Longbottom to misery through the madness of his parents. He destroyed everything he ever loved with his grasp at power. Just like his father; he ruined everything he could have been by grasping at a dream to large, a want too big to accommodate. Like father, like son.

When the Potter's home lit up with the backlash of the Death Curse rebounded from Harry Potter back to Voldemort, Snape was nearly lost to madness. He had betrayed the Death Eaters a thousand times over before they reached that point, desperate to save Lily Evans life. But to no avail. Voldemort did give her the option that he promised he would: if she would just step aside, she wouldn't have to die. He offered her one shot at mercy, at the price of the life of her son. Of course she refused it. Snape wouldn't have loved her, if she hadn't been Gryffindor brave, just like he was not.

The next ten years were trials and lies. Dumbledore covered for him. Snape was a spy. He gained a teaching position he hated over children he didnt' understand and often despised, but he had made Dumbledore a promise - since he could not save Lily, by Merlin, he would make sure her son lived.

So he did. When Harry Potter came to the school he was the picture of his father; thick glasses and tousled black hair and - Lily Evans's wide, green eyes. He hated the boy with the passion only the cuckolded could manage. But he kept his promise: the life debt passed from father to son, but the lve for Lily that still burned in Snape's breast - never, ever was passed to her son.

That didn't mean he didn't bend over backward to keep the damn, suicidally cocky boy ALIVE. He faced turncoats, spies, other Death Eaters, werewolves, more death eaters, his own friends on occasional, an angry tree. There were many adventures, lots of detention and a lot of free floating hate that was mostly reciprocated by the boy. He spied, he lied, he put his life on the line. Counter curses got him set on fire. He got tangled with the return of Sirius Black and it only got worse from there - they were never friends, and never would be. He managed to get Remus Lupin sacked in petty revenge, and quite possibly baited Sirius Black into rushing off to his doom.

Most importantly, he managed to get Harry Potter to thoroughly loathe him. The boy hated him and he cultivated that hatred. It was all he knew how to do; he had no idea how to get love or keep love, and so he did what he knew: he made the boy hate him. He made classes miserable. He insulted him and his father. He taught him hard lessons with no compassion behind them. He made occulumency their own special hell, till Harry turned the tables with his invasion of privacy. The boy had plenty of loving uncles in his misfit family, but Snape was the one who would teach him the hardest lessons, and some of the most important that would keep Harry Potter alive... but Snape didn't want gratitude. He just wanted to keep his promise.

And it cost him. It cost him most of his life: he lived like monk, dedicated to his work for nearly twenty years. He did not love or marry. He had only one friend, who manipulated him flagrantly -- even to the point where he asked for a merciful death, knowing that Snape would be the only one who could deliver it; Albus had doomed himself in the pursuit of Voldemort's defeat, but he knew Snape would never allow him to fall to the tender mercies of the Death Eaters. It enabled him to keep his ruse even more complete, when Narcissa Malfoy asked Snape to complete her son's mission: Kill Albus Dumbledore, or die trying.

All of these things wrought terrible cost on Snape's spirit and mind, over the last seven years of Harry Potter's life in Hogwarts, where he had grown from boy to man. Perhaps Snape could see, from his distant watch over Harry and his friends, that there was Lily in the boy, and that part of him deserved an explanation. Some part of him needed the purging, and there was only one place to do it - laying there, bleeding, as Nagini's poison was shutting down his nervous system. It didn't stop him from one last act, one last need for absolution from the only person who could give it, the only person who had suffered so much since Lily Evans had died...

Her son.

Damn his eyes.

First Person Sample:

I'm not certain how I got here. It's a far sight from where I'd been. But I do know one thing: there's nothing waiting for me where I was.

I'm standing in a dirty pit of a Fort in the middle of no where, but it's better then a shallow pauper's grave for dunderhead students who couldn't pass my classes to piss on.

Let's make the best of it.

Prose Sample:

He was just getting back to his feet when he realized he had no idea what in the name of Merlin was going on. The Barracks were a small, cold place in a very large cold wood, and it was not Scotland and it was not Wales, or England or anywhere he could recognize. So he had gone to see, exactly, what it was.

Standing at the gates, drawing his woolen cloak around him, Snape watched the trees rustle with a chill wind. He was a long way from home, and he found himself unafraid. There were -- problems here. People who knew. But they could be silenced, he was sure. The Weasley twins, at least. James-- that was another matter entirely.

He smirked at the dark woods, far beyond, and exhaled, watching his breath mist in the air.

If it was true, if one man could change Fate here, by Merlin and all that was good -- he'd fine a way to do so-- and he'd make sure Lily Evans lived. He promised that to the dark, abiding greenery that said nothing back, before he marched off into the green. There were herbs to gather, potions to work. He would not be kept useless, even if he had to brave the dark. After all, he would never change fate if he stayed idle and complacent.

The dark held no terror for him. He wore it like his cloak as he set to work.

Special Notes: To keep Snape under control for a time - and possibly from keeping him from James Potter's throat (I cleared this app with him so he's very aware Snape is coming to the village) - Snape will be arriving thoroughly poisoned and will need a healer and some recoup time. The Wood is keeping him from death, but Nagini's neurotoxins will certainly have their way with him. Whether or not he will have permanent damage will be up to how roleplay pans out - how much care does he get, how well was he cared for, was magical intervention involved, and so forth.

Nobody will find his bezoar until it becomes obvious that without it he's going to die, due to the character's inability to cure/heal him (if that's how roleplay falls out), and that will use up the bezoar. Otherwise, it'll remain in his inventory until used down the line.