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whitechapelTitle: Suspended Animation
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen
Characters: Severus Snape
Length: 416 words.
Summary: Hogwarts hadn’t changed in the least. [originally posted 2006.05.15]
Almost immediately after he took the job, Severus started feeling as though it was suffocating him.
It had been about four years since he left school, by that point, and he’d nearly forgotten how little variation there was in routine. In the interim Severus had almost managed to grow accustomed to unpredictability—it wasn’t usually pleasant, but at least he had been able to reassure himself then that he was accomplishing something. He’d also been able to change scenery once in awhile, which was a freedom he didn’t notice how much he liked until he no longer had it.
But Hogwarts hadn’t changed in the least, even when he approached it as a teacher rather than a student. Just as it had been four years ago, the work was dull and only challenging in the least cerebral sense of the word. Every member of the faculty was at least twenty years his senior, and almost all of them had been his own professors not long ago; they never said outright that he wasn’t an equal, but McGonagall regularly got halfway through scolding Severus before realizing that you listen to me, young man was no longer the best way to address him.
It might have been tolerable if it weren’t for the students, but as Dumbledore pointed out (twinkling annoyingly as he did so), the students were rather the point of the whole thing. The upper years remembered Severus Snape as that scrawny teenager who was Brilliant James Potter’s preferred punching bag, and at first tried to treat him the same way they would treat an ineffectual prefect. He refused to stand for that, of course, and eventually managed to scare them into attentive silence, but he still didn’t feel right trying to play teacher to people he had known in passing when he was a student himself.
Severus was acutely aware that he saw the same places, did the same things, and spoke to the same people with an almost clockwork regularity. He had been forbidden by Dumbledore to stray further than Hogsmeade “until things have died down,” which they weren’t showing any signs of doing. Even the letters he wrote to break the monotony were dull, keeping up the appearance of contact with all the right people just in case.
He felt compelled to write to his real friends, once in awhile, but Severus thought it was morbid to write letters to people who had died and didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: Gen
Characters: Severus Snape
Length: 416 words.
Summary: Hogwarts hadn’t changed in the least. [originally posted 2006.05.15]
Almost immediately after he took the job, Severus started feeling as though it was suffocating him.
It had been about four years since he left school, by that point, and he’d nearly forgotten how little variation there was in routine. In the interim Severus had almost managed to grow accustomed to unpredictability—it wasn’t usually pleasant, but at least he had been able to reassure himself then that he was accomplishing something. He’d also been able to change scenery once in awhile, which was a freedom he didn’t notice how much he liked until he no longer had it.
But Hogwarts hadn’t changed in the least, even when he approached it as a teacher rather than a student. Just as it had been four years ago, the work was dull and only challenging in the least cerebral sense of the word. Every member of the faculty was at least twenty years his senior, and almost all of them had been his own professors not long ago; they never said outright that he wasn’t an equal, but McGonagall regularly got halfway through scolding Severus before realizing that you listen to me, young man was no longer the best way to address him.
It might have been tolerable if it weren’t for the students, but as Dumbledore pointed out (twinkling annoyingly as he did so), the students were rather the point of the whole thing. The upper years remembered Severus Snape as that scrawny teenager who was Brilliant James Potter’s preferred punching bag, and at first tried to treat him the same way they would treat an ineffectual prefect. He refused to stand for that, of course, and eventually managed to scare them into attentive silence, but he still didn’t feel right trying to play teacher to people he had known in passing when he was a student himself.
Severus was acutely aware that he saw the same places, did the same things, and spoke to the same people with an almost clockwork regularity. He had been forbidden by Dumbledore to stray further than Hogsmeade “until things have died down,” which they weren’t showing any signs of doing. Even the letters he wrote to break the monotony were dull, keeping up the appearance of contact with all the right people just in case.
He felt compelled to write to his real friends, once in awhile, but Severus thought it was morbid to write letters to people who had died and didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.