The bare walls always felt slightly damp. The windows always seemed to let a chill in. He could not remember dusting more than a few times in the two decades since he had spent his first night here as a young man. The only furniture was the bed and the nightstand with the drawer, which was where she stayed.
The room was always one way, and each morning was always one way one. Dark or close to it. Cold or close to it. The old bed creaking when he moved, the same blanket pushed back. He put his feet on the floor and he opened the drawer to the nightstand. She was there, every morning, same as the noise the bed, the always fading pattern on the blanket he had never changed, the echo of his movements in the bare space.
He had three pictures of her. One she had given him when they were twelve years old. One he had stolen from her room when they were students at the school he now taught at. The last wasn't a picture, but a newspaper clipping from her wedding, an event to which he had been invited but had let pride keep him from attending.
They were all that was left of her, the pictures. The pictures and the boy.
He started with the one she had given him, her in long red braids, her inscription to him on the back in handwriting very neat for a child of twelve. In one corner, his hair was visible as he disappeared out of the picture, running from the camera. The picture had stolen was of her and her sister at Christmas when the two of them were teenagers. Her hair was a bit shorter, no braids. The wedding photograph, black and white, had been folded so that only she showed. He had thought it would be immature to cut James from the picture, but had picked up the scissors several times before deciding for good that it would stay as it was. Even if James was gone, the cut would show his absence. Part of arm would be gone along with it. And he knew, even if James was gone from the picture, he could never have that moment of her life for himself. It belonged forever to man behind the fold, the skinny man who wouldn't get a haircut for his wedding, who grinned forever in her direction.
He held them one by one, Lilly as a child, as a young woman, a young bride. He put them back and then he was ready.
Many of the teachers lived off campus with their families but he had none so he lived in a room at the school. There had been a short time spell between his stays here, as a student and a teacher. Those few years were ones he did not remember easily, but he did every morning, with the red haired girl, he thought on them and her and the her little house where she had lived for such a short time. It was gone, along with her and James. He was here now, with the pictures and the boy.
His day would go on because it had to. He would come back, from the summer day of her childhood, from the Christmas of her seventeenth year, from the day she was married to James. He would come back from her short life and he would dress and he would sit outside with coffee and a cigarette. He would read, he would supervise breakfast, he would teach, he would go back to his room. If he was lucky he could get through the day without seeing the boy.
And it would all bring him back here to the same room it always had. He would open the window, sometimes listen to the radio, sometimes spread out a newspaper, sometimes use his telescope to observe the stars. In the end, he went to her one last time.
Severus was well aware that his behavior was abnormal. He had been told so several times by Albus, who always sighed and patted his should when he pointed it out. He had tried to fight it, but over the years, he had fought so many things that this one he could not any more. Now that the boy was here, he needed it more than ever. He wanted to claim what he could of Lilly, hold what part of her he had. These were things he had the boy did not. He looked at the pictures and sometimes thought that though her son would never really remember her, he would. He had years of memories and Harry, none. Harry was half Lilly, but in a way, when he held the pictures, Severus felt like had more of her. He had years, good and terrible, to think on when he thought of her.
So he claimed what he could of her. He marked it as his, the day he ran from the camera as the picture of the two of them was taken. Most of all, that was something he would never share. There was no James, no boy, her smiling face turning toward the blur that was him. She was reaching for him, reaching to bring him back into the picture. She had loved him once, never more than as a brother, but he had proof of her love, her pale skin lit up with laughter, a freckled arm reaching for him.