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Who Are You?

Name: Erin
Age: 22

Who is Your Character?

Full Name: Severus Alexander Snape
Nicknames: None that he acknowledges, though Lily Evans was allowed to call him ‘Sev’ when they were children (though he didn’t let other people call him that). There were a handful of derogatory nicknames thought up by the self-appointed ‘Marauders’, but no one dares call him those things to his face anymore.
Age/Birthday: Born 9th January, 1960. 43 years old.
House and Years Attended: He was in Slytherin house, and was a student from 1971-1978. He returned to teach Potions in 1980, at which time he was also appointed head of Slytherin. He is currently still working at Hogwarts, though he is now the Headmaster.
Blood Status: Half-blood, his mother was a witch and his father was a muggle.
Occupation: Headmaster of Hogwarts.
Alliance: Order, though he’s no longer officially affiliated with them. His alliance is entirely secret at this time, and as such, the work he does for them is only what he is able without blowing his cover. His actions can be quite significant and helpful at times, but rarely is it something which either side of the conflict would identify as being done by him, thus robbing him of any acknowledgment he might receive for his efforts. He appears to be quite loyal to the Dark Lord.
Status in Society: He’s a Death Eater of high standing, a member of Voldemort’s inner circle and one of his most trusted. I will probably apply for him to have a slave if I’m accepted into the game, I think that since his true loyalty is to Dumbledore and the Order, he would consider it his obligation to do what he can to keep the enslaved out of more abusive hands.
Boggart: It used to be Lily Evans in various horrific situations, but in the years after her death it has transformed into a vision of the Dark Lord. His fear is really that the Dark Lord will not be destroyed, and thus the Boggart is Voldemort being successful in his quest. However, to the outward eye it would likely appear just to be an image of Voldemort, and it would not be considered altogether that unusual for a Death Eater to fear Voldemort, what with them seeing first-hand the kind of things he’s capable of. His entire campaign is motivated by fear, so I would think that it wouldn’t be too telling a boggart unless one had the insight to know its significance to Severus.
Patronus: A silver doe, a mirror image of the patronus Lily Evans had.

Personality: If one wanted to describe Severus Snape in a single word, it would be 'difficult'. He is a difficult person to understand, and an even more difficult person to be friends with. Throughout his childhood and young adolescence, he deeply needed the support of people around him even though he refused to acknowledge that to himself or to others. As a result, he made a lot of serious mistakes as a young man, and has spent much of his life trying to make peace with them and to redeem himself from them. He is extremely difficult to get close to because of his tendency to push people away with hostility and insults.

He's a very complex individual with many layers to his personality that make him hard to get along with. He is very opinionated and he does not take criticism well, though his willingness to hear others out has increased slightly over the years. Much of the criticism he's received in his life has been based on things he cannot control, such as his appearance or his most basic personality traits, which made him very resistant to hearing any kind of criticism at all. However, as he's grown older he's come to realize there are things about himself and his work that he can improve, and not everyone is trying to insult him when they offer their opinion. Though he desperately wants people to recognize his virtues, he does not know how to show them without seeming like he is very flashy or showboating, which is a personality trait that he despises. It is undeniable that he is intensely clever and a very talented wizard, but that is not the basis with which most people judge their peers, and most people decide they do not like him, which makes them far less likely to accept that he has some very good qualities.

Of course, this is only what one sees if they aren't close with Severus. Though it is difficult to get past the initial stages of friendship with him (in which he can often seem unreasonable, insulting, or arrogant) once you breach that rocky start it is easy to see the good qualities in him. He cares very deeply about the people he's close to, and he can be quite witty and is certainly a good person to have on your side. Because of his intelligence and natural curiosity, he has an expansive knowledge of Dark Magic and Potions, as well as a gift with healing (as evident in his efforts to heal Dumbledore's hand). His friends enjoy access to his creativity in magic and that is not something to be dismissed. He has a great capacity for love if he is given the chance, and his love and passion for other people can drive his actions to an incredible degree, as was made obvious by his lifelong devotion to the Order of the Phoenix and Albus Dumbledore, an unlikely situation based in his love for Lily Evans and the need to avenge her death.

Family and Friends:

Aurora Sinistra is his closest friend, currently. He's known her since he was eleven, when they became friends at school. Though she was a year above him, they always seemed to be on equal ground when it came to study and interest, and they have been very compatible. Her quiet and constant support of him is one thing that has kept him sane through all these years; sometimes he thinks it's the only thing. They've recently taken their relationship into new, romantic territory, thanks to encouragement from Charlotte Montgomery.

Charlotte Montgomery is Severus' slave, though he doesn't think of her as such. He felt an interest in her when she was still in prison and they corresponded through the linked journals. Though he disliked her fatalist attitude, he felt she was bright and compassionate and tried to talk with her frequently, though they did have several arguments due to his tactlessness and occasionally deliberately hurtful comments he thought would pull her out of her slump. (Strangely enough, he's coming to find that people react poorly to such actions. Weirdos.) Eventually he submitted an application to take her specifically, and was granted custody of her. They've become more comfortable with one another as time progresses, and he considers her one of his closest friends, despite the age difference. If he really analyzed the relationship, it would be like having a much younger sister, even to the point of his general disapproval of the men she seems romantically interested in. Nonetheless, he is glad to have her in his life, and with both her and Aurora, he's made something of a little rag-tag family for himself that has helped him through the extremely trying events of the last year.

Other friends include Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. He's had a close relationship with Lucius ever since they were in school together, and he came to know Narcissa through association. He cares genuinely about the safety of the family and has gone to great lengths to protect both of them and their son.

Severus has no remaining family.

FORMER FRIENDS:

Lily Evans is probably the most significant relationship he's had in his life, a friendship which ended when they were only sixteen. He harbored a deep love for her throughout his life and when he discovered she was endangered, he turned his life around in an effort to protect her life. Although she died, he continued to work in hopes of redeeming himself and absolving his guilt. He continues to protect her son, although he doesn't like him even slightly on a personal level.

Albus Dumbledore was Severus' closest confidant until his death, the only man who really knew what was going on in his life and where his true loyalties lie. Severus killed Albus at his request, to keep his cover and to ensure that Albus would not die in a more gruesome way at Fenrir or Bellatrix's hands, and to protect Draco from having to commit the murder himself. This has cut off Severus' connection to the Order, although he continues to make subtle efforts to help them without their knowledge.



Appearance: Severus is quite tall and lanky, with very pale skin. Despite the fairness of his skin, he has black hair and unusually dark eyes, so dark that they also appear black. His most noticeable facial feature is his strong nose, which is a bit too large for his face and is hooked. He is very skinny, but surprisingly strong when he needs to be. He wears primarily black, but this is not necessarily because of his personality, but because he got into the habit of wearing his teaching robes even in his spare time. His hair is a bit too long, and is not well-cared for. This is because he had to learn a lot of things about caring for his body that other children were taught by their parents. His own family did not keep him clean or healthy through his youth and it wasn't until he went to Hogwarts that someone (the Prefects in his first and second year) took the time to tell him what he needed to do in order to maintain appropriate hygiene. Although the rest of his physical appearance caught up with the general populace, his hair never quite managed to meet the standards of those around him. He hates that it is so lanky and thin, but he just doesn't care enough to spend money buying expensive soaps or putting more than ten minutes effort into it on any given day. It is unlikely that his hair will start improving any time soon. He simply doesn't see the point, and he has far more important things to be worrying about.

Aside from strictly his physical features, Severus has a very unique air to him that tends to catch people's attention. He is very intense in personality and his face often reflects that. His emotions, aside from anger, are often very difficult for other people to discern because he's very good at masking his feelings. It's his opinion that emotion is a weakness, and when one doesn't know who their friends or enemies are, it's a vulnerability he is unwilling to allow in himself. As such, he usually wears an expression of mild suspicion or curiosity, and his feelings and expressions are unreadable in a way that make people uncomfortable. His gaze is often unusually intent, which also discomfits people. His strange nature and his intriguing speech patterns make people listen to him when he speaks, but they also mark him as something of an oddball and have always made him a target for bullies. Luckily, in more recent years, out of respect (or fear) most people have kept their insults to themselves, at least when he's within hearing range.

PB: Adrien Brody
Sexuality: Heterosexual. He's between a 1 and a 2 on the Kinsey scale.
Achievements: Severus did quite well in school and has very good scores in terms of testing throughout OWLs and NEWTs. In terms of more specialized skills, he is a superb Occlumens and an outstanding Legilimens. He can fly without a broom. He is exceptionally gifted in Potions and has a rare talent for inventing new spells. He is a former professor of Hogwarts and is now the Headmaster of the school.
Hobbies: Severus finds little time for hobbies, considering the amount of stress he's under and the amount of work he has to do on a daily basis. However, he does follow Quidditch (at least in terms of the school teams, he is not so interested in professional Quidditch). Potions work could be considered a hobby since he's no longer doing it to sustain himself financially. He also tends to read in the rare quiet moment.

Biography (three paragraphs minimum): Severus was born in an industrial town in Northern England. He grew up in a rough, impoverished neighborhood in a small brick tenement of workman's housing for the mill in town. He grew up with very little in the way of money, and although his parents had planned to have him, they had not expected him to require as much of their time and money as he ended up doing. Though this was not his fault, he suffered from neglect and an uneasy household in which shouting arguments between his parents were commonplace. He spent a lot of his time outdoors and he frequented a small play park some distance from his home. There wasn't a play park near him, but the one that Lily Evans and her sister played in was close enough that he could walk to it without much difficulty. Though he was embarrassed by his appearance of mismatched, ill-fitting clothing, he was eventually able to find the courage to speak to Lily, whom he had realised some time earlier was a witch.

Severus did not have a very pleasant childhood, left to his own devices (and at the hands of other, meaner children who alienated him because of his unkempt appearance and the accidental magic he sometimes used around him). However, the friendship he forged with Lily Evans came to be the highlight of his childhood, and he would grow to look back on it fondly because of her. Even as an adult he was able to find such joy in his relationship with her that his patronus took the form of hers, and was noted for the sheer brightness of its light. While he came from an unhappy homelife, his childhood and early adolescence was not devoid of happiness. He certainly treasured the time he spent with Lily, even when it seemed they were beginning to grow apart. When he went home for the summer, after beginning Hogwarts, he looked forward to it because he knew that it would be spent primarily with Lily. Although he disliked being around his parents and felt uncomfortable because of their unhappiness, he did like the freedom to go to see Lily without worrying about the social structures of Hogwarts, which seemed set up to keep them apart.

Severus doesn't remember his first magical sign (he was very young when it happened), but he does remember the fight that followed it. His father, unaware until then of his wife's history as a witch, reacted with fear and anger toward his young son for displaying such an alien concept to him. The marriage was nearly broken over it, but in the end Eileen was not willing to leave Tobias, and Tobias was not willing to let her. They stayed together, though magic was always a sore subject and Severus was never technically permitted to use it while at home (he did anyway, of course). He grew to hate his father and blame him for the misfortune of their family, believing that if he had been born into a pureblood family, his life would be infinitely better. It took him some time to learn that this was not necessarily the case, and he never quite overcame his hatred for his father.

Initially, Severus believed that going to Hogwarts would solve a lot of his problems. He believed it would be a place in which he would be accepted, where his magical gift would not be ridiculed or feared, where he would be celebrated for his cleverness and his work ethic. Sadly, life was not so kind to him. He did not anticipate the idea of the social structures he'd experienced in his early childhood also existing in the wizarding world. Slytherin was not widely regarded as the best house, in fact it was widely regarded as the house of sneaks and criminals. Rather than being respected for his placement, he was treated as if he was somehow defective or tainted. Even within his house he found it difficult to make friends, because he was not wealthy, he was not pureblooded, and he had a distinctive northern accent that was easily mocked by the people around him. He had nothing to show for himself except raw talent and brains, and he soon learned that it was better for his housemates to fear his curses than for them to openly mock him. That made him no new friends outside of his house, of course, but it did win him some allies within, people who valued his talent and recognized him as a gifted wizard, even where the administration and teachers in the school failed to see it.

He was not really encouraged by his professors, and they rarely punished the bullies from Gryffindor house for their treatment of him. He grew to hate Albus Dumbledore in the same way he hated his father. The man had the power to stop the suffering he was experiencing, but he chose not to. In fact, he went so far as to require Severus to be silent about the attack he had in his fifth year, when Sirius Black tricked him into nearly being eaten by a werewolf. This was the point in which Severus turned away from Dumbledore, as he thought, for good. It did not matter that Lupin wasn't able to control his actions while he was transformed -- he still allowed his friends to know about his condition, allowed them to let him run free on the grounds while transformed, and forgave them even for manipulating his condition in order to hurt someone else. Severus never believed that Potter was not in on the "joke", and Sirius Black never showed the slightest remorse toward him. Dumbledore covered it up, likely for the sake of his own reputation, and the desire to keep such willing soldiers on his side so that they could later sacrifice themselves for his cause. Severus found the action unforgivable, particularly as the boys continued to bully him even afterward, and continued to be embraced and celebrated by their peers as Good People, which he knew in his heart that they were not.

After the attack at the OWLs, Severus felt sick with himself. Although he did not truly believe that muggleborn individuals were inferior to purebloods, he had been spending his time around people that did believe such a thing. They threw around the insults so easily, and in the moment of his humiliation, Severus had wanted to hurt Lily. That disturbed him almost more than his easiness with throwing such slurs around. He couldn't believe that he had deliberately said something to hurt her. At the time, he had believed that she had betrayed him by sharing his spell with James Potter. He certainly hadn't taught the Levilicorpus to that smarmy idiot, and he didn't know how else Potter could have learned it. Somehow, seeing how Potter was showing off for Lily, the idea had sparked that she had given it to him. At the time, he hadn't been thinking clearly, and his reaction had been extreme and cruel, just as the entire situation had been. She had ended their friendship immediately and irrevocably, and Severus' life changed for the worse.

Without any reason to hold back from the path his friends were already heading down, he fully submerged himself in the Dark Arts that Lily had been so discomfited by. She would not be friends with him again anyway, it seemed silly to continue moderating his actions to make her happy. It seemed all too soon that Lily started dating the prat James Potter, which broke Severus' heart even more than it had been by her refusal to speak to him on friendly terms. He was filled with hatred for Potter, suddenly thinking that everything he'd ever done to Severus was for this purpose, to take Lily away from him forever. And the idea that Lily would be so blind to it! That she could forgive Potter's much graver and more violent "mistakes" and not forgive Severus' own slip of the tongue. A word was more unforgivable than six years of bullying? He wanted to make Potter pay, and he wanted his friends to pay. He would never fight alongside them, to be ridiculed and abused. He joined the Dark Lord just as his friends did, hoping to inflict on them the kind of pain they had done to him for seven long years.

He soon realised that the Death Eaters were not, exactly, the romanticised ideal that his Slytherin friends had spoken of. He was revolted by the complete lack of desire for political reform and love of Dark Arts, which was his own motivation for joining. He'd convinced himself that the others involved weren't the demonized creatures the corrupt press portrayed them as. It was incredibly hard for him to come to terms with the fact that the vast majority of the Death Eaters did not want any kind of revolution, not truly. All they wanted to do was kill, and be free to torture anyone they wanted. Severus himself had the desire to inflict pain on certain people, but to see his own friends be undiscriminating and unfounded hatred for everyone, to see them perform such terribly violent acts for absolutely no reason, it horrified Severus. He wanted to get out of the lower rungs of the Death Eaters... it was too late to take back his commitment to the organization. It was service for life, and he'd known that when he joined. The result of defection would be immediate termination, which he didn't consider a true option. So he did what the others were doing, and he tried everything he could to rise through the social status of the Death Eater circles, and he did so quite effectively. By the time he delivered the prophecy to the Dark Lord, he was already close to being in the higher circles of the group. That one act launched him the rest of the way into the inner circle, and safely away from the bloody grunt work he'd been so disturbed by.

It wasn't until the Dark Lord started suggesting potential births to match the prophecy that Severus regretted his decision. Voldemort thought the child was Lily Evans' child. He had single-handedly brought her life into the Dark Lord's line of vision, he had taken her from the status of 'general annoyance' to 'terrible threat'. He did everything he could to convince the Dark Lord that Lily didn't need to die, trying his best to make her life sound minuscule, trivial, unnecessary, trying to make her seem like an object he desired rather than a person he loved. To make her seem as valuable as she truly was would only put her in more danger, saved to be used as leverage to keep him in line. Still, even after his attempts to have her spared, Severus was unconvinced that the Dark Lord wouldn't kill her. He humiliated himself for Dumbledore, grasping at anything to protect Lily. Dumbledore, though he regarded Severus with unusual harshness, put more protection around Lily than he could have hoped for.

Unfortunately for all of them, even that wasn't enough. Lily died, along with her useless husband, and only the child survived.

In the years that followed, Severus started the long process toward healing. He would never fully recover from Lily's death, but he would become more able to function, more able to interact with others normally. He always felt as though he knew something more about the human race than everyone else, this nagging sense of the evil that could be contained in anyone, having seen it first hand through his experiences in the war. Although his colleagues at Hogwarts initially reacted to him very distantly, reluctant to get close to him, he did grow to view McGonagall in particular as a parental figure. She seemed less anxious around him than the others, and despite her being a Gryffindor, she was usually very level headed and fair. She seemed to understand that his past with the Death Eaters was something he had survived, rather than evidence to his true nature. She always stood behind Dumbledore's trust in Severus, and he always appreciated that.

When Harry Potter came to school, Severus found his life suddenly more difficult. The boy was exactly like his father, and made a point to disrespect him and undermine his authority at every opportunity. He deliberately broke rules, and worse than that, he felt entitled to do so. He was every bit as arrogant and insufferable as James Potter, which made it all that much more painful to see Lily's eyes looking out from his idiotic face. However, Severus had largely put his feelings for Lily to rest. It wasn't until 1994 when Remus Lupin came to work at Hogwarts and Sirius Black escaped Azkaban that Severus' emotional turmoil was rekindled. Sirius Black, the man who had betrayed the trust of Potter and, more importantly, Lily, was at large. The man who had sold them out to Voldemort when everyone had been working so hard to protect her! And he had escaped Azkaban, no one knew how, to come after Lily's son and kill him, too. Severus saw it as an opportunity, a chance to finally avenge Lily. Perhaps Black had been rotting in Azkaban, but he deserved worse -- he deserved the Dementor's Kiss. Severus would be all too happy to be the one to provide it for him.

At the end of the year, he very nearly achieved this goal for himself. It was Harry Potter that foiled the plan, the idiot, Severus couldn't believe that Potter would take on such pretension as to forgive his mother's murderer! The only way he could make sense of it was to convince himself that Potter had been confunded. It took a great deal of arguing and convincing on Dumbledore's part to make Severus acknowledge that Sirius Black had not, in fact, betrayed Lily. That it had been Pettigrew. And even after coming to terms with this fact, he couldn't completely suppress his emotional reaction of hatred and pain when forced to interact with Sirius or even think about him.

The following years were as stressful for Severus as any that involved Potterspawn. He resumed his role as a spy for the Dark Lord, using a great deal of creative lying and Occlumency to protect himself. Still, his role was always rather suspicious, and it wasn't 1997 that his life truly upturned. At that point, he killed Albus Dumbledore at the man's insistence. In that instant he secured his place in the Death Eaters and freed himself of the lingering doubts of his loyalty, and effectively cut himself off from any open help he could offer the Order of the Phoenix. Of course, he and Albus had extensively discussed what his role would become, so he knew to expect such a reaction from his former allies.

However, not everything that happened was expected. He was appointed Hogwarts Headmaster, which surprised him greatly, but which he was very grateful for. It was a position in which he could protect the students of the school far better than he could have if he'd been on the run. Though his colleagues were understandably stubborn when it came to him, he knew that at heart they all wished to keep the students as safe as possible, so he was unconcerned with their distrust and hatred for him. When given students making trouble, he made a point to give them detentions with the veteran teachers of the school; Hagrid, McGonagall, Slughorn. Though the Carrows were able to abuse students on their own time, or in their classes, Severus did his best never to allow the children into their hands if he could prevent it.

As the war progressed and the Dark Lord began imprisoning and enslaving those of impure blood and "wrong" political belief, Severus became more concerned with the situation. It was far more difficult to maintain hope for a defeat when the Dark Lord was so unbelievably powerful. He wanted to assist those who were fighting for freedom, but in such bleak times when he is so out of touch with the Order, it's nearly impossible to know what actions would be helpful and what will only make things worse. Still, he is doing his best to keep track of Harry Potter and help him anonymously when possible. He is also considering trying to obtain a slave -- he feels that it is his moral obligation to keep those being oppressed from falling into sadistic or evil hands.