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Gobstones and toads had worked a little too well on Petunia.
The games and the slime had finally made her, once so hungry for magic, take a step back from it—but the effect was almost excessive.
Now Petunia found herself worrying about her adorable little sister instead.
She fretted that one day Lily might turn into one of those gloomy figures in stories, hiding deep in some forest, brewing potions with strange creatures for company.
It was 1969 in Britain, and the most popular children’s book was Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales.
Its most striking feature, in Petunia’s mind, was simple: in those stories, witches were almost never good people.
Across town, Severus trudged back to Spinner’s End, feet heavy, dragging along the sooty pavement.
When he stepped into the cramped, dim house, his mother—who usually barely spared him a glance—suddenly sniffed the air and called him over, her expression unusually serious.
Severus did not dare defy his stern, cold mother.
He sat down in front of her at once, back straight, chin up, braced for another scolding about his behavior.
But the expected reprimand never came.
Instead, Mrs.
Prince’s eyes moved to the hem of his trousers, where a dark stain still clung from the “Stink Juice Duel” that had ended in a draw with Remus.
Severus instinctively pulled his leg back, trying to hide the mark.
Mrs.
Prince’s gaze lingered on the stain for a few seconds.
Her nose twitched almost imperceptibly, and something faint and unreadable rippled in her eyes.
When she finally spoke, her tone was oddly playful, laced with curiosity and a complicated emotion Severus couldn’t name.
“You went to play with children from other wizard families?”
“Yes.”
“Playing Gobstones?”
“Yes.”
“Who won?”
“I did.”
His answer was barely above a whisper.
Years of pressure from his mother made his chest feel tight, as if the air in the room had thinned.
Whenever she was like this, he always told himself the same thing: that her harshness was because his father had feared magic and abandoned them, twisting her into the person she had become.
Over and over, Severus silently repeated that it was because Muggles did not understand the greatness of magic that his mother had turned out this way—that this was why he could not have her love.
Only that kind of self-consolation allowed him to endure her sharp words with a blank face.
But today, his mother was not quite the same.
He even heard a small, almost smug chuckle.
Startled, Severus looked up—and froze.
For the first time he could remember, there was an actual smile on his mother’s face.
While he was still staring, Mrs.
Prince reached out, brushed his cheek with her fingers, and whispered:
“Severus, you are just like me.”
The tall, thin Mrs.
Prince rose to her feet, her figure casting a long, wavering shadow in the candlelight.
She turned to the bookcase behind her and pulled out a few volumes that were smoking faintly and screeching in protest.
From beneath them, she drew a tightly wrapped box.
For a heartbeat, she only looked at it.
Indulgence and sorrow mingled in her eyes.
She carefully brushed the dust from its surface, then set the box down in front of Severus and said simply, “Open it.”
Severus obeyed at once.
His mother was gentler and more patient today than he could ever remember; he didn’t dare do anything that might break this rare moment.
With quick, careful fingers, he unwrapped the box.
What lay inside was not a rare spellbook or a powerful potion, but a set of Gobstones inlaid with gemstones, so exquisite they were almost ostentatious.
The moment the lid came off, all thirty stones vibrated together, and a proud, ringing voice declared.
“The undefeated Witch of Hogwarts, the legendary player with ninety-nine wins—your pieces are ready!”
The grand, theatrical announcement left Severus stunned.
He could only stare at his mother.
Mrs.
Prince, for her part, looked a little embarrassed by the overblown words and awkwardly pushed a strand of hair back from her face.
“I was the captain of the Hogwarts Gobstones team, after all,” she said.
“It’s only right that I have a specialized set of Gobstones.”
Severus listened to his mother speak, her voice drifting as though she were talking more to herself than to him, and from the bottom of his heart he felt it—something about her really was different today.
Normally, his days were crammed with memorising potion ingredients, practicing potion-brewing, and studying the Dark Arts.
The slightest mistake earned him a harsh scolding.
When had there ever been such a strange bit of magic as this—mother and son sitting together with a set of gobstones between them instead of a simmering cauldron?
Silently, Severus prayed in his heart,
‘Oh, great Slytherin, have you heard my prayer?’
But Mrs Prince paid no mind to whatever was going on in her son’s head.
When had she turned into a witch who did nothing but hide indoors brewing potions?
She couldn’t remember.
Yet today—at least today—she wanted to teach her son something new, something she was truly best at.
Clearing her throat, she said to the daydreaming Severus:
“Let’s play a game of Gobstones.”
Let’s set aside, for the moment, Severus finally tasting his mother’s nine-years-late affection, and the Evans family’s turmoil over their second daughter’s magical talent after Petunia’s anxious complaints.
At that very time, Mrs.
Figg was shuffling slowly toward her front door, four kittens in her arms, when a furious bellow crashed out from next door: “Damien!!!”
The sheer volume made her jump.
Snowball scrambled up onto her shoulder, staring wide-eyed at the neighboring house.
Mrs.
Figg wrestled the little troublemakers—who had been playing wildly all afternoon—into her living room, then shook her head in the direction of the shout.
“Looks like little Damien’s in trouble again today.
Poor Catherine, it’s never easy when your son’s too clever for his own good.”
While Mrs.
Figg and her furry hooligans settled in for a warm, peaceful evening, next door Damien and Remus were sitting properly on their chairs, enduring Catherine’s furious lecture.
And the reason?
Catherine had come home with her shopping only to find Damien completely uninjured, Remus reeking to high heaven, and that beautiful set of Gobstones clutched in their hands.
When Hope finished parking the car and walked over from the garage to witness the exact same scene, Catherine’s temper finally exploded.
Remus watched Damien sway under the storm of scolding and wanted to protest that he hadn’t ended up like this simply from playing with Damien.
But when he saw Damien subtly wave him off, Remus could only stay silent and let Damien take Aunt Catherine’s verbal battering alone.
Why wouldn’t Damien let him speak?
Right now, the only thing Catherine knew was that Damien had doused Remus in Stinksap.
In her eyes, Damien was bullying Remus, and she felt guilty toward Hope.
At worst, it was just a pair of naughty children earning themselves a lecture.
But if Catherine discovered that Damien had been the one to urge Remus to take the Gobstones outside and show them to a little girl from a Muggle family… a little girl from a Muggle family…
Damien thought of his mother’s usual, almost rigid insistence on the “International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy,” and of her absolute intolerance for anything that might risk exposing the Wizarding world.
A chill ran down his spine.
He resolved, then and there, to bury this part of the story completely.
Under no circumstances could Catherine learn the truth.
Otherwise, this lifetime’s first proper thrashing from his dear mother was practically guaranteed.
Unfortunately, to Catherine, Damien looked like he’d not only let his thoughts wander during her scolding but had even started making little hand signals.
Her anger, already at boiling point, flared even higher.
In Remus’s eyes, unable to bear watching any longer…
Damien was hauled upstairs by the ear by his furious mother.
Remus silently made the sign of the cross for him in his heart; in that moment, he truly admired Damien as a warrior.
The wonderful summer holiday slipped by in a flash.
While Remus was desperately scrambling to finish his homework, face twisted in misery, Damien had already completed those simple assignments with ease.
In his previous life, he’d waded through mountains of textbooks and oceans of exam papers.
No matter how many years he’d been out of school, if he now had to slog through these questions one by one like Remus—questions whose answers were practically obvious at a glance—wouldn’t that be an insult to all the effort he’d poured in back then?
Damien wore his smugness openly, positively glowing with pride, completely ignoring how ridiculous it was for a university-educated adult soul to compete with a nine-year-old over who could finish fourth-year primary school homework faster.
Watching Damien stroll leisurely ahead of him, Remus felt jealousy and bewilderment twist his features.
“Damien, I don’t understand.
Why is it that you mastered these things so easily?!”
“Because I’m smart, Remus.
Obviously.”
“But when we were learning that magic stuff you didn’t know, our progress was about the same, wasn’t it?”
“That was because my mind was wandering at the time.
Don’t overthink it—just hurry up and finish your homework.”
“You don’t want Mr.
Claire to smack your palms with a ruler, do you?”
The words, hissed in an ominous whisper behind him, made Remus shudder.
He shut his mouth and, face full of misery, bent over his workbook and devoted himself to finishing it.
Watching Remus slog through his arithmetic with that pained expression, Damien felt a peculiar sense of superiority rise in his chest.
“People’s joys and sorrows are never quite the same, are they, Remus?”
Confronted with his friend’s smug, punchable face, Remus ground his teeth and tried to block out Damien’s infuriating voice.
But just as Damien always let himself be dragged around under the blazing sun whenever Remus felt like wandering, getting Damien to shut up now was absolutely impossible.
Remus had no choice but to bury himself in the sea of problems, doing his best to ignore this bastard who had already finished his homework.
“It’s so hot, Remus.
I’m going to buy an ice cream.
Want to come?”
At that, Remus’s head snapped up.
He glanced at the newspaper beside him, which clearly read that today’s temperature was 22–31 degrees Celsius, then looked very seriously at his insufferable friend.
He gritted his teeth and growled,
“I don’t like icecream!” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“Really?
And who was it that once blew all his pocket money on ice cream, then came begging me to lend him more so he could buy another?”
A “frenemy” is called a “frenemy” precisely because, just when you’re about to snap, that sort of person will twist the knife and make sure it goes straight through your armour.
Unable to endure Damien’s arrogance any longer, Remus slammed his pencil down, ready to have a good “brawl” with him.
But Damien had long since predicted this reaction.
He let out a long, mocking laugh and, riding that laugh, bolted straight out the door.
Remus was left behind, glaring resentfully after his fleeing friend.
Then, with a silent sigh, he turned back to his little desk and continued grinding away at his holiday homework.
Meanwhile, Damien, already racing down the street, was mulling over his next target.
“Petunia and Lily are just like poor Remus; they haven’t finished their homework yet.
It’d be way too cheap to go and provoke those two little girls right now.”
“Severus, on the other hand, doesn’t have any holiday homework.
Like other wizarding families, he’s homeschooled…”
“Alright, that settles it.”
Bored enough to annoy even cats and dogs, Damien made up his mind in an instant, pivoted, and sprinted toward Spinner’s End.
He didn’t notice that this second life was quietly remaking him.
The calm numbness polished into him by his previous existence was flaking away, and he was slowly becoming more and more like an ordinary nine-year-old boy.
Environment really does shape people.
Don’t you think so?
By the time Damien reached Spinner’s End, his pace had slowed.
The alleyway was filthy and chaotic, littered with rubbish and streaked with suspicious, unidentifiable liquids in the gutters and corners.
The surrounding residents were all workers from Cokeworth’s only factory—the Cokeworth steel mill.
After a day of backbreaking work, half the adults in the neighborhood ended their shift with a bottle in hand—and once they were drunk, they became a real danger to anyone living here.
Taking in the street around him, Damien saw that while the houses weren’t exactly falling apart, the whole area still felt like a place where trouble simmered just beneath the surface.
In that moment, he finally understood why Severus clung so desperately to magic.
Only magic could let Severus escape a world that rejected him.
Only magic could give him that thin, pitiful sense of security he had.
As Damien walked on, the stink of human waste hit him; there were smears of excrement by the roadside, baking in the air.
Holding his breath, he pushed forward until he stopped in front of Severus’s house.
He rapped on the door in an even rhythm and called softly,
“Hello, I’m Damien McGonagall.
I’ve come to see Severus Snape.”
For a moment, there was silence.
Then came hurried footsteps, and the door swung open.
Severus—his trademark greasy hair already in place—grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside.
He dropped his voice, urgency and worry tangled together.
“I told you not to come here.
There are plenty of blokes round here who got fired from the steel mill—they get up to all sorts every day.
How could you dare come over?
If we really ran into something, without a wand we wouldn’t be able to protect ourselves!”
Looking at this younger, limited-edition Severus Snape—one who still cared enough to fret over people and lecture them at length—Damien felt a quiet, inexplicable satisfaction.
He lifted his hands in a helpless gesture and blinked at Severus with mock innocence.
“They haven’t finished their holiday homework, Severus.
You’re the only one who doesn’t have to do any, so you get stuck keeping me company.”
Severus’s eyes went wide at Damien’s shamelessness.
He stared at him in disbelief.
“I’ve already told you—I have to finish the study tasks my mother sets every day.
I have to study magic theory, memorise the properties of potion ingredients, and teach myself the Dark Arts.
If I don’t finish, my mother punishes me.
Where do you get the idea that I’ve got so much free time?”
Damien listened to the complaints with a fixed, amused smile.
Still shrugging, wearing that easy, confident grin like a star Quidditch player, he slowly dropped his trump card:
“But whenever Lily’s free, somehow you always manage to go out…”
He didn’t get to finish.
Severus’s face flushed scarlet, and he clamped a hand over Damien’s mouth.
When he spoke, his voice was low, threaded with a despair he could barely hide, every word squeezed out between his teeth.
“My mother’s downstairs brewing a potion!
I’m begging you, Damien, don’t say Lily’s name in this house, all right?”
Damien took in Severus’s face—now red enough to rival a monkey’s backside—and nodded quickly to soothe the boy who looked on the verge of overheating.
As soon as Severus let him go, Damien couldn’t resist one last poke.
“But I think Aunt Prince probably already knows.”
“Damien!!!”
Severus all but howled.