The ink bottle stood open.
The ink on the nib had long since dried.
I stared at the parchment.
How should this life be set down?
She should have belonged to the Prince family
She should have walked with pride
Yet she stayed in this broken home
As quiet as a joke
Who would read of this fall?
Did anyone care about her?
Who would write of her struggle to be loved?
Long and short, short and long
Inch by inch, crumbling away
Who would listen to this fall?
Did anyone ache for her?
Who would erase the shame of those bygone years?
Over and over, clear as day
Severed in one stroke, her magic
The price she paid
Cedrella married away
Andromeda never returned
I deliberately turned a blind eye
To the dust and grit staining her robes
She had once obeyed him so
She had once followed in a Muggle's footsteps
In this suffocating home
She stayed devotedly by his side
-Excerpt from "Severus to Eileen Snape"
(I happened to be listening to music and made this up on a whim, to the tune of Gigi Leung's "Short Hair." Give it a try if you're interested.)
He took out a blank sheet of parchment.
He was going to write something.
But he did not put pen to paper right away.
He was considering a question.
A question he had never considered before.
What would happen if someone wrote Eileen Prince's story-not academically, not in the terminology of psychology-but in the simplest words, telling the simplest story?
What would happen?
Who would read it? Who would care?
A witch from a pure-blood family had married a Muggle.
Such things were not uncommon in the wizarding world.
Cedrella of the Weasley family had married a Muggle accountant.
Tonks's mother, Andromeda,