#nonbinary snape

5lazarus:

and the final day for @snapeloveposts‘s Trans Snape Week!
Day 8, Peace: It’s not quite happiness, and it’s certainly not contentment, but Snape finds a measure of peace playing bartend between schoolyears.
Crossposted to AO3 here.



Where do all the quiet queers go? They come to this dive bar in Cokeworth, to brood in their beers and listen to Joy Division. Some shuffle into a dance, some people chat, and Snape keeps four bathrooms going so at least two are used for shitting and not coke. It is the greatest thing they have ever done for the Wizarding World, opening up this quiet bar, and it is revolutionary in how it shifts the conversation. Finally, they all have a place to congregate. And it whiles away the summer months.

Running a gay bar-slash-cafe-slash-record shop was never going to be profitable, but it gives Snape a sense of peace. The Wizarding World is inherently campy, but comment on it and they cut you dead. Even Dumbledore stays in the closet. Here, though, all the queers come out of the woodwork, and as bartender Snape holds supreme control. They can snarl at them to leave them alone–just because they’re making them a cocktail doesn’t make them a therapist.

It’s community service really, the best thing they’ve done since Lily died. Snape gives them a space and people fill it. They find a sort of peace listening in on other people’s conversation, with the bar to separate them from the others. It is as safe as the Wizarding World can be. Sluggy comes by every so often. He’s invested in the bar, makes noises about franchising, but stops when Snape reminds him of the terms of their probation. They need to spend ten years in the same stop, and anyway, can Horace really imagine them as a bartender for the next decade.

“It does seem a little unlikely,” Horace says, mustache twitching. He swirls his pineapple fantasy in his glass and downs it. Smacking his lips, he sighs happily. “You do have a way with a shaker, though. What’s your secret?”

“Hatred,” Snape says. Horace blinks, but Snape chuckles slightly, and pours him another glass. They could see themselves being perhaps not happy, but at peace, doing this for a bit. Not long, they like to think and act and create and fight too much to do this every night. But for the summers between horrible terms, flat broke until they get their stipend back, it’s fine. It’s not really enough, but they are not the type of person ever to be satisfied. There’s something congenital in them, where they are never quite at peace. But this is the facsimile of calm. The murmur of voices as the pale sunlight filters through the fogged glass windows soothe the leaping beat of their pulse. They do not wish they were dead anymore. They feel a perfect indifference to life, and that, as Lily might have said, is progress.

One of Sluggy’s friends comes by, so Snape retreats to the other end of the bar. They’ve got two weeks until term, and they’ve been procrastinating on their lesson plans. Blott said she could get their revisions for Advanced Potion Making out before Yuletide, but Dumbledore couldn’t change the curriculum without an eighty percent majority of the board of governors, and Borage was related to ninety percent of them so there really was no point in pushing for the new edition to be put in. Still, they’re proud of the work they’ve done, considering the circumstances.

Poppy suggested they take it day by day until they could think in months again, and Snape thinks about what they have done over the past five years. They’ve gone to Naples, they’ve betrayed the Dark Lord, they’ve buried their best friend, they’ve come out. They’ve begun listening to music again. They haven’t gone to New York, but there will be a conference, and the school will pay for them to go find Moondog at his corner, and that is a certainty. In all that has happened, the fact that Snape has survived is revolutionary. They catch their reflection in the glass and smirk. For once their face sticks. Snape is no Apollo, but the robes hang better on them than the sculptor ever managed.

“Your body’s a fucking revolution,” Snape mutters under their breath. The words rings true, though they don’t understand what they mean. But there is the certainty of having the next decade to find out, and that gives them the facsimile of peace.

5lazarus:

for@snapeloveposts‘s wonderful Trans Snape Week event
Day 7, Revolution: The conditions of release are not easy.
crossposted to AO3here.


What the Ministry does not garnish from their wages, Lucius Malfoy takes–for paying Snape’s room and board during their apprenticeship, so he says. Snape is tired of being broke. The school pays for room and board, and expenses all work-related matters. What is left over from their patent money barely pays upkeep and taxes at Spinner’s End. They had promised themself they would eat better than just beans on toast as an adult, but it looks like that is yet another promise they have to break.

Snape starts preparing the greenhouses. Pomona catches them at harvest-time, stressing out over the cucumbers rotting on the vine.

“What’s the matter?” She does not call them kid. “Go to the kitchens, they’ll prepare something if you want it badly enough.”

“It’s for the summer,” they say. “I’m not staying another summer in this place.”
Pomona blinks, and understands. “You’re not getting your Head of House stipend, are you?”

“It’s rendered to me once I’ve been at the position for ten years,” they say. “As per the conditions of my probation. I need to prove employment stability, so my Auror says.” It’s one of Mad-Eye’s laws. It does not affect most of the old money types, who feed the court. It’s not only Snape who is fucked, they’re one of the few ex-felons treading water. The rest, if they haven’t made it to the beach, are drowning in debt. They’re lucky. It doesn’t feel like it, life should be more than just survival, but they are just barely getting by.

After a long pause, Pomona finally says, “That’s ridiculous. Have you spoken to Filius about it? He’d done a stint in Azkaban, too. He only had to wait two years–reduced for good behavior.”

Snape laughs. “Good behavior–what’s that?” They finish their harvest and bring it back to their kitchen, and begin the long process of pickling and preserving. Their grandmother used to croon an old labor song, “Bread and Roses.” They sing in her memory, “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses!” The Dark Lord had promised them that, at the expense of the muggle of course, and it had been yet another false promise, but He had understood the slow starvation of a joyless life. The Wizarding World has been disenchanting. Snape wants more. They deserve it, they know it, to have their hunger satisfied.

At the end of the day, satisfied with the array of jars on the kitchen bench, Snape lopes off to the Hog’s Head. This at least they can expense. They sip at some terrible Firewhiskey and wonder what new privation the summer will bring. They can always sell the house, but Tobias always said never to let go of property, the landed classes had taken enough of the land, if you have a corner, defend it ferociously. Of all the things their father said, that is the least horrible.

“Fuck this shit,” Snape mumbles over their glass. “We need a revolution.”

Aberforth stares at them with his gimlet eye. At least his eyes don’t sparkle like his brother’s. “‘Workers of the world arise’?” he mocks. “‘You have nothing to lose but your chains!’”

Snape barks a laugh, drains their glass, and coughs as they set it down. Wiping their mouth, they say, “They’re doing a good job of convincing me my chains are all I have.”

5lazarus:

for@snapeloveposts‘s Trans Snape Week.
Day 6, Passion: Snape finds music to article when they cannot speak, a new passion to get through the week to those freeing summer days.
Read on AO3 here.
Here’s the song the clerk shows them, and here’s an article on the composer.

They’ve got time all mixed up. The school day drags on in a haze and Snape beats the recipes into their students’ heads to the tune of “Just Like Heaven.” In their personal lab, they dance as they brew, singing along to the record player Lily had charmed for them, so very long ago. They can carry the best of the past into the future, and the present is what they are passionate about now. There are conferences to attend, papers to write, potions to play with, people to meet and fuck and laugh at. A friend wants to go see Patti Smith in New York for the summer, why the fuck not? Now they have the money, why don’t they go?

It’s music that keeps the blood thundering in their veins. Snape listens to the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith, and then goes back to their mother’s music. Weekends are for Nina Simone, the Who, Brian Eno. They had given the first twenty-two years of their life to Lily and the Dark Lord. Now they’re constructing a new self from radio and records, and Snape is liking what they’re listening to.

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