lips

{ Body Headcanons }

Severus has thin lips, which he inherited from his mother’s side of the family. While Eileen herself had fuller lips, from her maternal side, Severus has the angular lines that come from the Prince line through his maternal grandfather. ( He also has the Prince jawline, though it is debatable on whether he gained his nose from his mother or his father as both had pronounced, narrow noses. ) 

Due to the atmosphere at home, Severus learned to be very subtle in his expressions in order to evade sparking tempers through overt actions. As a result of this, he developed a very dour countenance quite young and learned to mimic his mother’s manner of twisting lips into various, nuanced expressions that on normal features could range anywhere from snarls to smiles. 

Thinning his lips is often a sign of displeasure or deep thought, while openly curling them tends to only be utilized in aggressive fashions. This is, again, because overt emotion was punished – utilizing it became associated to violence and anger, to temperate situations in so vicious a fashion that Severus developed nigh animalistic tendencies when it came to expressions involving his lips. 

Smiles are very rare – again, most species bear their teeth as a sign of aggression and in the Snape household this was no different than it might have been in the animal kingdom. Flashes of teeth were threatening – which is very much why in his youth, Severus smiled close mouthed or not at all. As he aged, he took to flashing his teeth as a means of warning his friends, a sign of pending aggression – his smiles in the first war were heralds of mischief at best and brutal actions at their very worst. 

The singular exception to this was around Lily – she was much more extroverted than Severus himself, and he learned to express himself differently around her in order to keep up with her. When Severus laughed or smiled around her, he was unguarded and natural. His teeth were never a threat, but his smiles would vanish swiftly the moment another stepped into their vicinity. Lily is the only person who has seen Severus treat a smile like something normal, rather than something furtive or secret, aggressive or shameful. 

Although he had other friends, his smiles among them were as much masks as anything else. He behaved differently with Eric and Lucas than he did with Eric and Destin, because the dynamics were vastly different. His behavior around Narcissa or Lucius another direct contrast, one more openly deferential, it would be many years before he would risk even the ghost of smiles around them because he operated under the awareness that as a halfblood, he was by no means their equal and must, at all times, be dignified in their presence. And dignity, by then, was equated to controlled emotion and masked responses that bordered toward inscrutable even in youth.

There are very few who are privileged enough to understand what certain turns of Severus’ lips mean, who can accurately deduce the difference from when he is containing laughter or silencing wrath. More often than not, his lips are counted as venomous and lashing as his tongue and few ever come to note how much is said, in the corners of all he does not say.