WT

🕯️ ⋆.˚ — some boys are taught how to be loved. others learn how to survive, and spend the rest of their lives mistaking the two for one another. severus snape has never been particularly good at being a boy. raised in a home where tenderness was scarce and anger was familiar, he has learned to make a weapon of his intelligence, his tongue, and the distance he keeps between himself and everyone else. at hogwarts, he is brilliant, bitter, difficult to know, and far too accustomed to being the person nobody chooses. lily evans has always been the exception. but even the oldest friendships can begin to rot at the edges, and there are parts of severus that she cannot reach, no matter how desperately she tries. then there is {y/n}. perhaps they will become another name he learns to resent. perhaps they will see something in him worth understanding. perhaps they will discover that beneath all that bitterness is not some secretly perfect boy waiting to be rescued, but a person who has been hurt, who hurts others in return, and who has never quite learned the difference between being feared and being safe. set during the marauders’ era, this is a story about the things we inherit without asking, the people we become to survive, and the quiet, terrible difficulty of allowing ourselves to be known. because sometimes the loneliest people are not the ones nobody loves. they are the ones who cannot believe it when somebody does. “oh i love it and i hate it at the same time. you and i drink the poison from the same vine”