I Show Not Your Face
Disclaimer: Were I to gaze in the Mirror of Erised, I would see myself holding all seven Harry Potter novels, my name emblazoned on the spines. Deep and desperate as that desire would be, it would of course be sheerest fantasy. I own nothing here: all hail to the gifted woman who does.
Speaking of originality—or lack thereof—there are already Snape-looks-into-the-Mirror-of-Erised stories, a number of them quite good. But such is the lure of the glass: I couldn't help seeing what it revealed to me.
He knew the boy was out of bed and out of bounds, he felt it in his bones. What made him certain was not merely the instinct honed over a decade tracking delinquent adolescents. This, after all, was James Potter's son: the compulsion to break rules must be in his blood. And it was Christmas break, too, which meant a scarcity of likely culprits to begin with. If it had been last year, Snape might have suspected the Weasley twins in that incident in the restricted section of the library. But now that Harry Potter was here . . .
And something else was here too, something, or more probably someone, evil. Snape had not thought to be pressed into service as Harry Potter's protector so soon, but already this evil someone was trying to kill The Boy Who Lived. Also known (in Snape's mind at least) as The Boy Who Reminded Him Of His Worst School Enemy Every Time He Looked At Him, The Boy Whom Snape Had Reluctantly Sworn To Guard With His Life, and The Boy Who Was Risking Both Their Necks For The Sake Of A Night-time Lark.
He walked noiselessly through the darkened halls, not daring to light his wand. His breath misting the chill air, he passed empty classrooms filled with ghostly moonlit desks. Though angry at being kept from his warm bed, he was actually less so than he would have been before Potter's arrival. Since the boy had come—bringing with him mortal danger—Snape had so much trouble sleeping he'd taken to prowling the corridors at night just to burn off nervous energy.
Then he saw it. As he passed one classroom he caught a silvery, fugitive gleam out of the corner of his eye. Flattening himself against the wall, he peered around the door to discover what it was.
There did not seem to be anyone there. Nonetheless, he entered to investigate the source of the light still glimmering from the back of the room. By the time he realized what he was seeing, it was too late. He jumped back, but he'd already gotten a glimpse, and he could not make himself move away. He had to look again. He edged closer.
"Severus, if you patrol the corridors after dark I must warn you: I have placed the Mirror of Erised in one of those disused classrooms on the fourth floor. Like any sane person, you will presumably wish to give it a wide berth."
"The Mirror of Erised? Why in the world get that thing out of storage?"
"An experiment, Severus, an experiment. A necessary one, or I would not take the risk. For some reason the Mirror is not considered dark magic. It probably should be."
"I assume it is pointless for me to ask what you are doing?"
"Alas, Severus, my apologies. But do it I must."
As moonlight streamed into the room Snape was not certain whether he should curse or bless Albus Dumbledore. What he saw in the mirror pierced his heart like scores of sharpened daggers, while also filling him with a wild excitement he had not felt in years.
It had been so long since he'd seen her. Oh, she was always in his thoughts, but as is often the case with memory, her features tended to blur round the edges. And sometimes, too, all he could recall was her reproachful look when he tried to apologize for calling her a Mudblood. Surely she would look at him even more sternly if she knew of the role he had played in her death. Even though he had tried to protect her after unwittingly exposing her to danger, he doubted she could ever forgive him.
But there Lily was, her dark red hair shining, her green eyes sparkling, smiling in that goofy way he'd forgotten she had. How could he not remember? It was the look she used to wear when she spotted him in the halls between classes and would give him a little wave. And yet, after all this time, could she still be so ridiculously, heartrendingly young? Surely she could not have been that young when she'd died. But then he remembered: she had only been twenty-one. He was now thirty-one himself, no advanced age, but the extra decade might as well have been centuries for the way he felt.
And, yes, miraculously, she seemed glad to see him. In fact, she seemed as happy as he. Even though she could not speak, the joy lit her eyes, and she reached a hand toward him. He stretched out one of his too, but his fingertips only smudged cold glass.
Somehow this reminder of her intangibility did not much bother him. He devoured her with his eyes, the way he used to on the playground in the northern town where he'd first seen her.
So entranced was he that he did not immediately notice the others. Or perhaps they were not there at first. It seemed, in fact, that Lily herself subtly changed even as he looked at her, becoming more mature, but when she did he saw the three of them, a man and two children. They were posed as if for a family portrait, the man with one arm around Lily's shoulders, his free hand resting on the shoulder of the girl standing in front of him. One of Lily's hands gently pressed the shoulder of the boy standing in front of her.
The man's face was turned toward Lily, but there was no mistaking the profile. Snape stared in disbelief. The man was himself.
How could the mirror be right in saying, in its backward writing, "I show not your face"? It was most definitely his face, as he could see more clearly when the man turned his head and glanced curiously at his twin outside the glass. There was Snape's shoulder-length black hair (less greasy, true), his black eyes, his pronounced aquiline nose. The Mirror-Snape smiled and Snape saw his own teeth, less yellow but still uneven.
The main difference between himself and this twin was their expressions. Mirror-Snape radiated a quiet contentment; he was not sour, heartsore, and embittered like the man staring at him. The cause of Mirror-Snape's contentment was obvious: he and Lily shared the comfortable informality of a couple lovingly and happily used to each other. And the children . . .
Snape's eyes rested first on the one closest to him, the girl. She was around ten or eleven, with Lily's dark red hair. But when she looked at him, he saw she had his eyes. She seemed shy but also friendly, gazing at him with a kind of puzzled concern. She glanced quickly up toward her father—for so he must be—as if for reassurance, and he nodded. Her black eyes swung back toward Snape's face, less shyly but still with that precocious, sober compassion.
And the boy . . . At first, bizarrely, Snape thought he was Harry Potter, and that he had somehow gotten into the glass as the capstone of his evening's escapade. There was the black hair, Lily's piercingly green eyes—but no glasses. And it was not James's untidy shock that met Snape's eyes; it was his own smoother, longer hair. The boy's face was Snape's face when he was eight or nine. But whereas young Severus had had a pinched, unkempt look, this child was well cared-for—well-fed and, even more obviously, well-loved. Snape could see it in the way the boy looked up at his mother, in the glance he gave his mirror-father, who returned it fondly. Like the girl, the boy seemed not to know what to make of the Snape outside the glass, but like her he was willing to be kind. He smiled.
If the sight of Lily had both pierced and enthralled him, the sight of these children simultaneously smote his heart and flooded it with fierce desire. He longed to be the man who stood inside the glass, the man able to overcome the harsh circumstances of his early life and find love and happiness. He yearned to learn how to nurture, although, given his own unloved childhood, he might find this hard. Surely, though, even he could learn to care for his children, not as he had been treated by his father and mother, but as he had longed to be treated instead. Lily would help him—would have helped him, he amended. Even as he thought this, Mirror-Lily looked at him with sad tenderness.
Fool, he hissed at himself, this is what you could have had, if you had chosen love rather than hatred.
Of course, he could not be sure. Maybe Lily would have married James Potter anyway, or at least someone else, even if Snape had not become a Death-Eater. The Mirror was showing him what he most wanted to see, what he had never dared to hope for after he and Lily made such different life-choices. Yet one thing was certain. Whoever he would have been had he not chosen dark magic would not be the man he was now.
He thought the pain would kill him, and yet he could not stop gazing, as intensely as if his eyes could bore a hole in the glass and allow him to enter the world it showed him.
He heard a sigh behind him, the sigh of someone who seemed old and very, very tired. He did not need to turn around to know who it was.
"Severus." Dumbledore's voice was weighted with sorrow. He came to stand beside Snape, but—and rapt as Snape was he still noticed this—did not himself look in the mirror. He placed a hand on Snape's shoulder, a gesture that reminded the younger man of the boy in the glass and his father. He continued to gaze at them, defiantly now.
"Severus—" Dumbledore spoke again, but before he could say more, Snape found himself shouting.
"No!"
"Severus—"
"No!" Snape realized he sounded like a distraught child. "No," he repeated, less loudly but with no less emphasis. "I will not look away. I will not leave with you. I will not leave them." His eyes met the mirrored Lily's, and she smiled.
"You know that you must leave them," Dumbledore was patient. "Before the Mirror of Erised men have—"
"Gone mad, yes," said Snape coldly. "I go mad on my own anyway. Now at least I have them."
"You do not have them, Severus," Dumbledore said sadly. "As you well know."
Silence fell. Snape had not once looked at Dumbledore. He was still drinking in the mirror's sights, the more desperately now that someone was trying to stop him.
"You do not even know what I am seeing," Snape said, as if this made a difference.
"No," Dumbledore admitted. "But whatever it is, it is not good for you to stay here."
The older wizard glanced toward the mirror as he said this, and Snape, turning his head slightly for the first time, saw Dumbledore wince and look away.
It was the wince that turned the balance. Snape would never have thought he had the strength to leave the room, but somehow the sight of Dumbledore's pain—and brief as the sight had been, Snape knew that the pain was deep—brought the younger wizard back to himself.
"You too," he whispered. Dumbledore nodded.
They stood there a while, Dumbledore's eyes on Snape, Snape's eyes locked on Lily's. He could no longer bear to look at the children, but they seemed to have vanished anyway. All he could do, for a few final moments, was to drown in a brilliant sea of green.
To say that he tore his eyes from her was more accurate than that figure of speech normally is, yet still not descriptive enough. It was more as if he ripped out his eyes when he broke contact with hers, as if he left a limb behind when he wrenched himself free of the trap. He thought to see blood gushing onto his black robes, but there was nothing.
He did not look back. He did not speak. He simply walked with Dumbledore, out of the room and into the cold darkness of the corridor.