Chapter One—A Heartfelt Good-Bye

When Snape apparated in front of Gordric's Hollow, the sign of the Dark Lord's presence was the billowing wisps of smoke rising from the hole in the roof. He looked both ways down the deserted street to make sure no one was following him, and entered the wrecked building.

The front door had been blasted off its hinges. Snape picked his way through the wooden splinters and made his way into the hall, peering into the living room. A wand was sitting on the couch, the only thing that looked as though it hadn't been touched during the fight that had gone on in this room. The wand was familiar. It was the same one that had thrown curses at Snape in his years at Hogwarts. It was the same wand that had been the cause of so much of his pain and bullying. It was the wand of James Potter.

How could James have been so stupid? He couldn't go up against the Dark Lord defenseless! Snape knew James was arrogant, but he never knew how much so until then.

Snape moved out of the den and back into the hallway. And that's when he saw the body of his old enemy lying on the floor. James Potter was dead.

But if James is dead...

Snape stopped himself from thinking his worst fear. Lily couldn't be dead. She would have run. She would have disapparated. She was smarter than James Potter.

He stepped over the body, unable to look at it. Despite the torture and hate that Snape had seen in that face, he couldn't bear to look at it again knowing he was the cause of James' death.

Severus Snape moved up the staircase and the first door was barely hanging onto the door frame by a hinge. Snape knew. The dreaded voice in his head was whispering words, dark tendrils of words that threatened to strangle him without mercy. But still, he moved on.

He moved across the threshold and saw her.

Lily.

Oh, Lily!

She was on the floor, her arms wide in the last futile attempt to save her child, her lips partly open in a final scream, and her green eyes were wide in a horrifying glimpse of her last moment. Her dark red hair was strewn out around her head in a waterfall of red earth.

"What have I done to you?" he breathed, falling to his knees and cradling her head in his lap. He picked up her soft hand. It was still slightly warm. "I'm so sorry, Lily. I'm so sorry." He pressed her hand to his lips.

Maybe it's not too late...

"No," he said. "Impossible."

But a part of him willed it to be. He wanted to see her again—alive. He wanted to see her smile. He wanted to see her eyes. He wanted to look into them and tell her how horrible this all was, and how it was terrible to see her body laid out upon the ground as if she were nothing more but a puppet with cut strings.

He reached for his wand and whispered, "Rennervate." It didn't work. Lily was still lying dead before him. He put his wand over her heart and said loudly, "Rennervate." A tear slipped down his cheek. "Wake up," he begged. "Please." Again, he tried. "Rennervate!" But to no avail.

"Lily," he said, saying her name aloud for the first time in a long while, "I'll do anything. Wake up. Please, wake up!" But, he, a master of the Dark Arts should have known there was nothing he could have done to bring the light back in her dead eyes. He closed them ever so gently and let the tears roll freely down his stricken face.

"Remember the time," he said, "you got the password from Isa, another Slytherin, so I didn't have to sleep in the hall because I forgot it once? And the time you fed the Giant Squid a potion that had gone bad? And the time you promised to never let being in different houses stop us from being friends?" His tone grew darker and louder, as if he were accusing Lily of what happened. "What about the time you promised to always be there for me during the summer?" he sobbed. "You said whenever my parents fought, I could just send an owl and you'd be there?" He stumbled over words in his rush to get them out of his mouth, as if they had been kept in for too long and turned to poison inside him. "Do you remember when you said you'd never let your sister say anything about me again? Remember the summer of our third year, you said there couldn't be anything more powerful than our friendship? Do you remember?"

Snape was shouting now, throwing harsh words at her dead body as if she could take all of his secrets and her unfulfilled promises to the grave with her.

What about you, Severus, a voice hissed from the back of his mind. You're so much more responsible for what happened. You practically sold Lily to the Dark Lord!

All of the pain he'd been holding in for years was coming out tonight in racking sobs that shook his whole frame.

"I know," he cried. "I know! I'm the one! YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED ME!" he yelled to the night.

And then he realized he was clutching his left forearm. The place where the Dark Mark was burned into his flesh. A mistake he would forever regret.

He took the tip of his wand and used a charm to cause the tip of it to feel like a razor whenever it made contact with anything. He pushed it to his Dark Mark and sliced away.

There were scars over the brand from previous attempts to remove it this way. But this was the first time Snape felt so desperate to rid himself of the thing.

I. Belong. To. No. One.

And then a baby cried.

Snape looked up and finally noticed a child who had watched on with curious eyes—Lily's eyes. He stowed away his wand and threw the sleeve of his robe back over his bloody Dark Mark. The little thing continued to watch Snape and never broke eye contact. Snape finally had to look away.

But what his eyes met were Lily Evans. She would always be Lily Evans to Severus. Never a Potter.

He leaned down slowly and his lips touched her smooth forehead. It was a painful thing—the kiss. It represented too many years of pain and sorrow and the possibilities of what could have been. And then he stood and left the room, leaving Harry Potter to fend for himself until help for him came.