Inside the cold, gloomy Potions Office.
The rustle of rapidly turning pages rang out.
Snape was holding a book much like an animated flipbook, his finger pressing against the bottom corner as he flicked rapidly through its pages.
On the turning pages, two tiny, charming figures interacted in all sorts of ways, telling a beautiful story of friendship.
Beneath a swaying tree, a thin, withdrawn boy lay back, staring blankly at the sky.
Then a little girl in a floral dress arrived and lay down beside him with easy confidence.
With sincerity written all over her face, the girl spoke to him for quite some time, but the boy never said a word.
The girl did not mind. She simply went on talking about the little things in her life, both the troubling and the happy.
Together, they quietly watched the clouds gather and scatter overhead, the sun rise and set.
For several days in a row, the boy and girl came to the tree by unspoken agreement.
One day, the girl suddenly failed to appear. The boy's silent expression turned anxious, and he paced beneath the tree, not going home even after the moon rose.
He waited and waited, all the way until the following day, when he was soaked with rain and dew and shivering.
Then the girl came skipping over, and the boy immediately hid his emotions.
After fussing over him for a while, the girl happily performed a little magic in her palm. The boy realized that they belonged to the same world: they were both wizards.
From that day onward, the boy was no longer silent, and smiles gradually appeared more often on his face, until they went together to a grand, ancient school of magic.
That was where the flipbook's story ended.
Yet Snape