chloe

One Flew Over the Fwooper's Nest - COMPLETE

~340k words, Post-War SSHG

"Stop me if you've heard this one: a mental patient, a witch, and a priest walk into the village pub..."

It turns out that if you tell the staff at a Muggle hospital that you're a wizard, the former headmaster of a school of magic, and also a murderous, serial killing gang member of a racialised hate group, that they are quite likely to lock you up on a closed ward.

Incidentally, to Severus Snape - exhausted and war weary - that sounds like just the thing.

High-powered Barrister at Law Hermione Granger disapproves, of course, and is on a mission to expose her ersatz professor for his malingering.

A hair-raising, wild, fun romp through the Cotswolds blending the genres of comedic farce, folk horror, spy thriller, and small-town mystery, this post-war slow-burn basically has it all! I sincerely hope y'all will give it a try and that it's as enjoyable to read as it was to write! :D

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do you ever think about how much of the original trilogy artoo spent silently watching the drama go down with popcorn

It's Severus's first year as a Hogwarts professor. He is still going through a lot, what with grieving Lily and being Dumbledore's spy and a double agent. Having just barely avoided Azkaban. If he didn't have responsibilities, if he didn't have the fact that he had promised to protect Lily's son, he wasn't entirely sure he would have even survived Lily's death. It felt like a huge chunk of him had died and been excised from his soul and it was raw and bleeding and painful. So much that he didn't think it would ever stop. This was just his life now.

But then his birthday rolled around. He had intended not to make a big deal of it, not to even let anyone know. What was there to celebrate? Birthdays were a celebration of life and he had no interest in celebrating the misery that was his own life.

Besides, no one liked him. If anyone would celebrate, it would just be out of half-hearted obligation and filled with generic and insincere platitudes and he would prefer very much to avoid the whole bloody thing.

Besides, he had never been what some might call a social butterfly anyway.

But, of course Dumbledore had to announce it to the entire school at breakfast in the Great Hall. He was aware that Dumbledore hated him, generally you don't like people whom you have openly admitted disgust you, so he was certain the old man had done that on purpose to annoy him.

"Happy birthday to me," Severus muttered under his breath, sarcastically. Despite the noise of everyone giving the obligatory half-hearted cheer (though his little snakes did give quite enthusiastic cheers) drowning him out, he was still certain by the look on Dumbledore's face that he had somehow heard and was smug about it, the old git.

But later that day, a small first year girl, one who was quite a bit smaller than many of her fellow first-year peers but the same age, had stopped him in the hallway and given him a little homemade doll in the shape of a bat and told him happy birthday in such a sincerely kind way that it stopped him in his tracks.

Severus had had physical punches to the gut that hadn't knocked him for such a loop before. His chest was painful for some reason he didn't want to examine.

"Thank you," he said to her, honestly shocked that he could form words at the moment let alone sound so calm and put together, and accepted the little stuffed animal.

snape: *chilling on a leaf*

bellatrix: wait

snape: *experiencing happiness for the first time in his life*

Or the conversation that led to it going like "Severus, go after the troll!" "What, who, me? Why?" "Because you're a fit young man and the rest of us are all old and frail." "O-Old and frail?! Rolanda teaches Quidditch, why can't you send her?" A yell of "SEVERUS" from everyone and off he scurries while grumbling about it under his breath.

like, the lack of alertness and callousness of it all is ridiculous. ridiculous enough for you to know just how filthy privileged he was growing up.

the golden trio were whipping their wands out at the sound of ants crawling across floorboards during the second war, they were pretty much clutching their wands even when asleep. yeah that's what happens when you're in fight or flight mode your whole life, with nobody to hand you everything on a silver platter and everybody attacking your class of people.

now imagine what it must've been like for snape, risking his life to play double agent when he was already in a socially compromising position.