Nothing Breaks Like A Heart - Severus Snape x OC

Chapter 3 - Heartbreaks can open your eyes to happiness!

Living room, Prince Cottage, Cornwall, December 1978

Olivia Prince-Fawley lounged in her soft, midnight-blue silk pajamas on her cream-colored, comfortable couch. Smiling happily, she sipped her favorite dark chocolate and breathed in the scent of the beautiful flower bouquet – white roses, rosé pinks, rosé, and pink chrysanthemums and purple honeyworts. Severus harvested them in their greenhouses and plucked them as a token of his love every morning for her. She couldn't believe that she could call herself Mrs. Olivia Prince-Fawley now. Her life seemed like a surreal dream come true. Being married to the love of her life, studying in her second year as a Mediwitch in the prestigious Medical School of the Merlin Institute in New York City and developing new Healing Spells for the injured and sick. Brushing her stunning engagement ring – a center sapphire surrounded by little diamonds arranged in the form of a flower on a simple white-golden band – and her beautiful wedding ring – a three-stone diamond ring on a simple white-golden band with the engraving Olivia & Severus – Forever – with her porcelain fingers, she remembered their teenaged fumblings at Hogwarts with fond smiles and played vacantly with her honey-blonde curls.

She had had a huge crush on the sarcastic, witty and mysterious boy with the sad onyx eyes and sleek ebony hair since her third year. She admired him for his ingenious experiments in Potions, spectacular dueling skills in DADA, witty remarks in his fights with the Marauders and creative Defensive Spells in his duels with his Gryffindor bullies. Although they always targeted him four on one, he outwitted them with his brilliant mindset, nonverbal spellcasting, and agile movements. Whenever Olivia encountered a duel between him and the Marauders in the corridors, she would disarm one of the Gryffindor toerags, jump in the duel on Severus's side and call out the Marauders for their cowardly bullying ways. She would report the incidents to Prof. Flitwick or Prof. McGonagall, urge them to start an Anti-Bullying-Campaign as well as to declare a No-Tolerance-Policy for bullies at Hogwarts and to reduce the prejudices between the Houses, but the Hogwarts Professors weren't open for her ideas. They called them unpractical, against the competitive streak of the Houses and a pipe dream.

Naturally, they would put the Marauders into detention, deduct house points and remind them that bullying was a grave injustice that left scars on every survivor's soul for life and unmasked the ugly personality of the bullies, but that didn't stop the Marauders. On the contrary, the developed new methods and spells to stalk Severus, ambush him in hidden alcoves and put him in the hospital wing. Olivia hated them with every fiber of her heart. She was disgusted by their cocky attitudes, boastful demonstrations of their newest Quidditch moves and mocking stories about their latest attacks on "Snivellus". In her opinion, they were sadistic, air-headed and cruel bastards who felt joy and power by tormenting a lonely, intelligent boy. Whenever the girls in her Ravenclaw Common Room swooned in giggles about the handsome face of Sirius Black, the cute smile of James Potter and the sexy scars of Remus Lupin, she called them out for crushing on mean, self-centered and arrogant bullies. She voiced that cruel bullies like them could never be loving boyfriends because they got off on hurting other people physically and emotionally, humiliating them in front of a crowd and turning their lives into hell. And even the devil had a handsome face. Hence, they shouldn't fall for them, unless they wanted to end up in an abusive relationship.

With a wistful sigh and shake of her head, Olivia recalled the reactions of her husband's teenaged self to her actions against the Marauders. He had glared at her with a deathly look and a deep red face, urged her to move out of his way, leave him alone and stop poking her nose in his business and tried to chase her off with some nasty remarks. But Olivia wasn't easily intimidated by his harsh words, his in annoyance raised eyebrow or his angry sneers. She felt that Severus was only rebuffing her support out of a misdirected sense of hurt pride and the experience of needing to fight his battles alone. Hell, she knew that the Gryffindor airheads and some Slytherin toerags would probably mock him for needing a girl to defend himself. The Wizarding world was a patriarchal society where women and men had two ideal-typical roles in the mindset of the Pure-bloods. Whereas the women educated the children, supervised the house-elves and supported their husbands' companies or political careers, men protected their families, managed their finances and made a name for themselves. Thankfully, some of these ideals were questioned and adapted to their modern times in the '70s, but a boy who had been defended in a fight by a girl was still a sore spot for many schoolboys.