Darkness.
Not the peaceful kind.
Heavy, muffled, pressing in on every side.
A thick warmth that tastes of iron and salt.
I can't breathe—no, that's wrong, I am breathing, somehow, but not with lungs.
The thought slips away before I can catch it.
Something pulses.
A drum.
No, two drums.
One close, one farther.
But not beating together in rhythm.
The second drum beats with a rhythm that steadies me even as everything else writhes.
I'm not supposed to be here.
that's the only truth I know, though I don't know where here is.
Pressure.
Tremors.
My whole world convulses.
A sound crashes through the warm ocean—low, rhythmic, until a piercing scream fill my ears.
A woman's scream
Light explodes.
Not gentle light, but needles stabbing into my sealed eyes.
Cold rushes in, and the warm ocean vomits me out.
I tumble into air, slippery, helpless.
Hands catch me, hold me up for inspection.
A shrill wail fills the room.
Mine?
Yes, mine.
I hate it.
I want to shut up but can't.
Voices crowd in.
"Healthy, strong—look at him!"
"Such hair already—"
"Congratulations, Mrs. Potter—"
The words bend and twist.
My ears, or maybe my brain, can't keep pace.
But one name lands with weight: Potter.
That shouldn't be my name.
Should it?
I force my eyes open.
The world blurs—too bright, too loud, too much.
Shadows in white and green robes.
Wands glinting.
One woman claps her hands together, smiling down at me with teeth too white.
And then I see her.
Red hair plastered to her face.
Green eyes wide, shining with exhaustion, relief—no.
Not relief.
Horror.
Pure, naked horror as she locks eyes with me.
Her lips move.
Sound grinds against my ears.
The word crawls into me like a parasite.
"Severus."
The name shatters me.
I know it.
I know him.
Dark robes, sallow skin, a sneer sharper than a blade.
Hatred curling like smoke.
A lifetime of bitterness.
Severus Snape.
My stomach twists because I understand what she sees at the nursemaids took me to get wrapped as the metal in the room shows me my new form: the hooked nose, the curtain of black hair plastered damp to my skull, the downward pull of my mouth that already wants to scowl.
I am not her husband's son.
I am instead the child of another... a betrayal.
Her hand flies to her mouth.
She stares at me as though I am a curse dragged out of her body, something that should have stayed buried.
Tears spill sideways down her face, caught in the sweat on her temples.
"No—no, no—"
The room stirs.
Voices murmur.
The witches in green tilt their heads, exchanging nervous looks.
But no one can stop what happens next.
Her body seizes, arches, and she screams again—louder than before.
The healers rush to her, pressing her down, commanding her to push.
Another child.
The realization drips slowly into me, thick as honey.
I am not alone.
But the thought is torn apart by chaos.
My senses scatter.
My own body feels wrong, small, alien.
Fingers like wrinkled worms twitch helplessly at the air.
My vision swims with green curtains, gleaming instruments, sparks of magic.
I should be dead.
I remember dying.
Don't I?
The details skitter out of reach whenever I try to catch them.
A city street.
A flash of metal.
Cold spreading through me.
Was that the end?
It must have been.
Yet here I am, dripping and wailing in the arms of strangers.
And she—my new mother—cannot even look at me without breaking.
Her cry splits the air.
Another contraction.
The bed rattles beneath her as the healers swarm.
I hear encouragement, urgency, the practiced tones of people who have delivered hundreds of children.
But her gaze keeps flicking back to me, and the horror in her eyes never softens.
Her whisper clings to me like a curse.
Severus.
The pair of drums that agitated and conforted me in the darkness, one was hers, while the other... the other must be his.
Something else is coming, another life clawing its way into the light.
I am not supposed to be here.
I should not look like this.
I should not be him.
The truth gnaws at me: I have been shoved into a story already written, a tale whose ending I thought I knew.
But I am wrong.
The script is changing, and it begins with the way Lily Evans stares at me as though she has birthed her enemy.
The cries of the next child swell, and with them, my own terror.
Because if I am the child of severus, then who is coming next?
~
The room smells of sweat and iron and the sweet, antiseptic tang of St. Mungo's.
For a moment the smells mean nothing — they are backgrounds to the louder truths: the hot flood of light, the sting of air, the feeling of hands that don't belong to me smoothing the cloth that wraps my new body.
I am being bundled, tucked, moved.
Movement that is not my own stumbles me; the world becomes a series of tilted planes and muffled sounds.
Lily's face is a comet blazing in my sky.
She is a comet that does not orbit me but instead throws off sparks that scorch.
Her green eyes are wide and too-bright; they look at me as if she can see past skin, past bone, into a wrongness that hums under my scalp.
Her lips keep forming the name like it hurts to say it: Severus. Severus. Severus.
Each time she breathes it out something inside me splinters further.
They wrap me tighter.
The fabric is soft and smells faintly of lavender — the kind they use to calm screaming babies.
My scream is still there, braided into me like a muscle I can't yet control.
A woman in green leans close, her voice oily with practiced warmth.
"Mrs. Potter, you must rest. We'll take him to the nursery. He'll be safe—"
"Take him away," Lily says.
Not a plea.
Not a request.
A command that falls like an iron weight.
Her voice is thin, a string pulled so tight it might snap.
"Take him away now."
The nursemaid who holds me stiffens.
Her gloved hands hesitate at the strap of the sling.
Murmurs ripple through the other women: surprise, pity, a touch of indignation.
They do not speak the word aloud—who would admit that a mother had signaled so decisively?
In here, in hospital rooms where life and death are common currency, they are still surprised by the speed of a woman's repudiation.
"Mrs. Potter—perhaps a name?" a soft voice suggests.
Naming is ritual.
Naming is anchor.
Even a child about to be unmoored gets a line thrown to them in the form of a label, a tiny rope to tie to the world.
Lily's jaw is a cliff edge.
She looks at the second child — the one just born, whose hair is a soft brown, whose face is fair like warm milk — and the entire room tilts toward him.
The contrast is a blow; the two infants, placed side by side in the blur of linen and light, look impossibly different.
Where I am scowling already, dark-haired and sharp-nosed, the other is round-mouthed, sleepy-lidded, as if he had been painted by gentleness.
"No," Lily says.
The one syllable is a verdict.
Her eyes snap to the nursemaid holding me.
"Take him to the Foundling home. He is… unwanted."
A cold that is not weather runs through me.
The phrase settles like frost across my little limbs.
Unwanted.
I am less than an hour old now and should not have the vocabulary for shame yet, but I feel it as a pressure in my chest: small, inevitable.
I do not know how to be less visible.
I do not know how to be any other face.
The nursemaids look at one another.
The senior matron — a woman whose silver hair is twisted into a bun so tight it looks carved — bows her head politely while the tips of her fingers go pale at the knucklebones.
"That is a rather severe decision, Mrs. Potter," she murmurs, because politeness is armor in the hospital. "Perhaps you would—"
"I will not keep him." Lily's voice is paper-thin and full of iron.
She will not break.
She will not soften.
"I do not—" She stops, as if finding the next word would require digging through a buried hurt.
Then, suddenly, as if to make the act irrevocable, she snaps her hand toward the door.
"Do it. Take him to the orphanage. Now."
The nursemaid places me into a cradle on wheels.
The metal is cold, shocking against the skin that still tastes of the womb.
The women wheel me toward the outer room where shadows are longer and decisions are made in quick, efficient gestures.
The last thing I see before the doorway frames them like a smaller world, is Lily's face.
It is a map of fractures: anger, exhaustion, fear, sorrow folded so tight she might suffocate on it.
She does not look like a woman who just birthed two children; she looks like a woman watching a prophecy unspool and deciding to cut the thread.
One of the younger nursemaids, her mouth trembling in ways that betray sympathy, ventures,
"Mrs. Potter—will you at least give him a name? For the records—"
Lily's laugh is a thin wire.
"A name?" she says, but she does not sound amused. "He is not mine. He has no right to my name. Let those who claim him name him; give him their list. I will not name him."
That is the most violent thing I hear that day.
To quote a great if misguided white wizard.
'Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic'
Taken literally to be granted a name is to be given power, to have your existance proven, but instead i was denied that.
To be denied a name is to be left in the dark without a lantern.
The nursemaids exchange glances; some faces harden into the protocol of their profession.
The matron bows once.
"As you wish, Mrs. Potter."
She does not look triumphant.
She looks tired.
She looks like she knows where this kind of command leads.
They wheel me out.
The corridor outside smells of boiled potatoes and loaned linens and old grief.
Feet shuffle.
A cart clanks.
I watch through a crack of fabric as the world I have just landed in moves away without me.
The door swings and the light splits.
Before it closes entirely, the other door into the room opens with a sudden creak that makes my bundled body bob.
A man stands in the doorway, framed by the pale light from the corridor.
His hair is messy in the way that happens when you have been doing other things all day — or not sleeping.
Round glasses sit crooked on his nose, and there is a tiredness in him that is different from the kind on Lily's face: his is softer, edged with something like relief or private joy.
He entered the room with great excitment so much so that he doesnt even notice me being escorted out the back door.
He looks at the new baby, at the child in Lily's arms.
He looks as though he has been waiting for this for a long time.
"Lily," he says, voice low and rough-edged. "He's beautiful."
Lily's eyes sharpen.
For a suspended second there is only the two of them, two halves of a decision.
Then, as if answering a tacit call, the man steps forward and bends toward the little brown-haired infant.
His smile is crooked, the sort of smile that forgives the world its mistakes because he has decided to love anyway.
"We'll call him Harry," the man says, and his voice is a balm that fills the room with something warm and human. "Harry Potter."
They say the name together, like some ritual that cements a thing into being.
The syllables hang in the air — not loud, not ceremonial — but small and stubborn as a promise.
Harry Potter.
The cart bearing me continues down the corridor without fanfare.
The door to the room closes softly behind the pair — their faces, for a moment, visible through frosted glass like a scene in a painting.
Lily's expression is unreadable now, or perhaps it reads as only those who know pain can read: equal parts resolution and a grief that will not die.
A nurse's hand steadies the cradle as they turn a corner.
People pass in the hall — patients, porters, a wizard with a limp, a girl crying softly behind a curtain — and I become one more anonymous bundle tucked among the wheels and orders of the hospital.
They will take me to a cart, then a carriage, then a gate.
By the end of my first journey in this new strange world, i would wind up in a new strange place, a wizarding orphanage where i would remain until i turned 11 to join Hogwarts, or was deemed a squib and cast out into the muggle world...
Oh how wrong i was to assume that.
For it seemed the fair, and just Lily Potter nee Evans was just as cruel and twisted as her sister petunia.