Character Info
NAME: Severus Snape
FANDOM: Harry Potter
TIMELINE PERIOD: End of book 6 ("The Flight of the Prince") right after he kills Dumbledore and flees with Draco.

Character Background
There are very few things one could say with any surety Severus Snape is. There are many things that he has been:
Potions Master, Death Eater, Slytherin, spy. But about the only thing that can be said for certain about the man who
killed Albus Dumbledore is that no one but Snape himself knows what he's really up to.

Only child of Eileen Prince (a witch) and Tobias Snape (a Muggle), Severus grew up unhappy and insecure: his family
was poor, his mother cowed by an abusive husband whom she lacked the confidence to leave. He clung to the promise
of Hogwarts School as his escape. When he went away to Hogwarts, he told himself, everything would be different: he
would prove to everyone that he was better than his father or his mother or his badly fitting clothes. When he went to
Hogwarts, there would be nothing that could stand in his way.

It was that sort of ambition that got him sorted into Slytherin House, but it was in Slytherin that he came face to face
with some of the most unsavory politics and prejudices of the wizarding world: at eleven years old, it's hard to see the
bigger picture and Severus, who had grown up feeling small and insignificant, wanted to believe that there was someone
whom he was better than. The prejudices around blood purity gave him that: as a half-blood, he was better than the
Muggleborns, the "mudbloods." All except for Lily Evans.

Lily, a Muggleborn witch, was probably the single biggest influence on Snape's life; as a child, she was his sole confidant,
his only friend, and when he was a boy it seemed to him that she had everything that he wanted. For a while, as a young man,
he believed that he was in love with her, but that wasn't it, and long before he finally realized the difference between wanting
her and wanting to be her, their friendship had been destroyed. Severus, half mad with jealousy and coveting everything
Lily had and was, had joined Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters and Lily had married James Potter and had a son, Harry.

In the brief span of time during which Severus was earnestly loyal to Voldemort, he passed information to him about a
prophecy that he overheard Sybil Trelawney make to Albus Dumbledore, a prophecy which predicted Voldemort's downfall
at the hand of a wizard born at the end of that July. He hadn't anticipated the Dark Lord to believe that the child named in
the prophecy was Harry Potter; he'd never thought that his actions might unwittingly lead to his best friend's death.

In the wake of Lily's murder at Voldemort's hands, Severus changed his allegiances. He began to work, in secret, for the
Order of the Phoenix, acting as a spy. Through the end of the first war and then Voldemort's second rise to power, Snape
delivered information on the Dark Lord's plans and actions to Dumbledore and acted on his orders, an instrument in schemes
he often knew only fragments of.

Meanwhile, he taught Potions at Hogwarts and found himself thrown into the role of de facto protector of Lily's now-adolescent son.

The height of Dumbledore's trust and the most extreme of his demands came when Snape revealed the Dark Lord's plan to
make Draco Malfoy the instrument of Dumbledore's death. Instead, Dumbledore elicited an oath from Snape, that when it
came time, Snape himself would commit the deed.

In doing so, Snape in effect signed his own death warrant, knowing that the Order of the Phoenix would now consider him
their sworn enemy, and that whoever won the war, there would be no place for him in the world afterwards. On the night that
he finally killed Dumbledore's (in front of a group of Death Eaters, and with Harry Potter watching, in secret) Snape fled Hogwarts
with Draco, prepared to act the role of Voldemort's most trusted ally, still on the side of the Order even knowing that he can never
dare to tell any of them where his loyalties truly lie.

After more than sixteen years as a spy, Snape remains the only person to have fully and completely tricked the most powerful
Dark Wizard who has ever lived.

Player: Skyler