Based on the song 'Fields of Innocence' by Evanescence. Whenever I hear this song, I imagine Snape walking through the park where he and Lily used to play, thinking about happier times. So that's what this fic is about. Many lines of the song are woven into the story.

I Still Remember

It was a rather windy day at the end of August. The sun was shiny brightly, still not having been overtaken by the clouds that riddled the sky.

No one seemed to come here anymore. The same could be said for him, but every now and then he felt compelled to return here.

He sat down on an old concrete bench, watching the swings blowing back and forth in the wind, almost as though the ghosts of his past were there with him now, playing happily the way he and Lily had so many years ago. But his memories were somehow deficient, and they could never make up for the cruel emptiness of the reality he had to face every day of his life.

She was his heart, and now, all that was left of her was trapped in the eyes of a stranger. A boy that represented something he had always wanted, but could never have.

Snape stood up from the bench and slowly walked through the park amid the abandoned remnants of childhood memories, and he would smile when figments of long forgotten conversations rose up from them, reminding him that while the words had long ago been scattered to the wind, they were real, and forever imprinted on his mind.

She had made his life bearable. He had never known a spirit of such selflessness, of such kindness and purity. The sun was always warm when he was with her, but now it seemed somehow colder in her absence.

Suddenly the clouds passed before the sun, erasing his shadow from the ground, and making the wind seem all the more cold. Now, he was just another nameless and faceless man, arrested in his own sorrow, existing with wounds that hadn't even begun to heal.

He turned to leave, feeling the sting that occurs when happiness and innocence meets loss and despair. While his joy had been clouded by his grief, he still remembered the world through the eyes of a child. How he wished he could go back, believing only in the things they used to dream of, knowing nothing of this hollow void that had taken root in his soul, and not knowing just how black and lonely the darkness could be.