Dream you wide awake
Too late! He was too late! The flash of green had been visible from the end of the road leading to the cottage at Godric's Hollow. Severus Snape hastened his steps, running into the cottage which no longer had a fidelius charm on it, and thundered upstairs, past James Potter's surprised looking body.
The baby screamed in pain and terror in the cot, his head pouring blood, and Lily's body, wide eyed with that knowing look of death lay on the floor.
"Lily!" he groaned, and clung to her. "I'd sell my soul to dream you wide awake."
It should have had a tune to it, the words.
He gazed into her eyes, and suddenly it seemed as though they were together in some kind of a sterile waiting room.
"You would really sell your soul to dream me wide awake? It's a lot to promise," said Lily. "I thought you had already sold your soul to Voldemort."
He groaned and knelt before her, throwing his arms about her knee.
"I ... I was delusional, stupid!" he cried. "I'd give anything to save you."
Lily regarded him thoughtfully.
She tugged to make him stand up so she could look him in the eyes.
"If you would really do anything, make a pact with me now. Voldemort has split his soul into eight fragments, and one of them is in my son. Take it in his place, be a horcrux instead of my innocent baby, and I'll come back and help you search for the rest, so that you die to kill Voldemort, not my son."
"Anything, Lily," said Severus.
There were no headlines about the boy who lived.
Lily groaned in Severus' arms, and looked on him with startled clarity.
"Harry!"
Severus felt a burning pain in his head, which was dripping blood. He turned to watch Lily sweep up her son, and hold him close. The child's forehead was unmarked.
"Lily," he said, "Come to Spinner's End."
She looked at him.
"Sev, you know I love you like a brother, not like a lover, don't you?" she said.
"Then I'll be his uncle while we gather these damned horcruces," said Severus. "Whatever it takes."
He had no idea what sweet torture it was going to be to live with Lily as her beloved brother, but he did whatever it took.
The boy, after all, did not deserve to be a horcrux. And in due course, Lily and her son returned to Godric's Hollow, which had been patched up, and Severus saw them from time to time, until Harry started school.
Harry Potter was sorted into Ravenclaw without any trouble, and Severus felt a searing pain in his scar when he saw Quirrel.
He wrote to Lily. His will was already in order.
They had uncovered all the horcruces.
And then he challenged Voldemort to a duel.
Lily had the epitaph on Severus's tombstone,
"Mercy! Like water in the desert
Shines through my memory like jewelry in the sun"
It would be the early years of the new millennium before the words to 'Dreaming Wide Awake' were sung by the Finnish group Poets of the fall. The actor on the video looked astonishingly like a young Severus ...