Written for Hogwarts' Around the World Event: Lithunia - (spell) Lumos, the Care of Magical Creatures Assignment - Task 1: Write about someone throwing objects for some reason, and the Writing Club: Restriction of the Month - Write only about known Death Eaters, (object) portrait, Themed List - Ghost, Days of the Month - Face your Fears Day: Write about someone facing a Boggart, Showtime - Can't Get It Up If The Girl's Breathing? - (word) Addiction and Creepypastas - Jeff the Killer: Write about someone with bloodthirsty anger; as well as Celinarose, for the Monthly OS Exchange on the HPFC: Severus Snape, angst/drama and (word) addiction.
Word count: 1475
we all have to fall for something
The castle was silent at night. In the dark, with the portraits sleeping and no students buzzing around, Hogwarts felt like a very different place.
A calmer place—one Severus could actually stand, somewhere that didn't make him want to run away or start cursing Albus for ever thinking that making him a teacher was a good idea.
(cursing his own choices, for leaving him hanging between two masters, a slave who would never be free of his vows)
It was thrilling, too, knowing he had the power to wander around freely, looking for rulebreakers and knowing that no one would ever deny that the detentions he'd inflict were deserved.
All the detentions he gave were deserved, of course—unfortunately, not everyone saw it that way.
Idiots.
He was powerful here. Seven years spent hiding in corners when he studied here, afraid his next step would lead to ridicule and laughter, again—'look, it's Snivellus!' the taunting voices of his childhood echo in his mind, and like all his ghosts these days, they're hard to ignore and even harder to dispel.
Tonight, however, he isn't after wandering students—though finding some would absolutely make his day.
Tonight, he's chasing something so much more valuable—knowledge, or perhaps certainty.
(in his mind's eye, he still sees the Boggart—himself, ridiculed and laughed at like he had been for so many years, at Longbottom's hands of all useless wastes of space. Longbottom, who was lead to this by Lupin, another ghost there to haunt him.
in his mind's eye, the Boggart shifts, and shifts, and shifts, growing and morphing into a shapeless, terrifying thing, and Severus needs to know.
he needs to know what he's so afraid of.)
His footsteps echo loudly in the deserted halls. The sound is sharp, almost hypnotic in its rhythm.
Boggarts are easy to find when you know where to look. And Severus knows where to look—he's always known where to look.
Just another reason why he should be the one teaching those useless brats Defense Against the Dark Arts instead of that werewolf—at least he knows what he's doing.
(it's such a shame that Lupin's Boggart is entirely harmless, and that Albus is still so biased in favor of his precious little Gryffindors—otherwise, Severus would have been happy to introduce Lupin to some of his own medicine)
He finds a Boggart deep in the dungeons, far, far away from any occupied part of the classroom. The air is damp down here, and though it's summer outside, Severus' breath fogs in the air before him when he exhales.
Absently, he wonders how long it has been since the last time someone ventured this far down into the belly of the beast, so to say. A decade? Two? More?
It's no matter—Severus has found what he came for. He can hear it—a Boggart, trapped in a desk and rattling its cage. It makes Severus' lips twist in a cruel snarl, the way that desk rattles.
"Lumos," he whispers, and with a flick of his wand, an orb of white light floats away from its tip, casting an unearthly pale glow on the room.
As though it can sense Severus' presence, the Boggart renews its trashing, louder and more violently.
It almost makes him laugh, how futile that effort is—Severus knows the spell, and he's ready. There is nothing a mere creature can throw at him that he can't overcome.
With a silent Alohomora, Severus unlocks the drawers on the desk.
What pours out of there isn't anything human, or even remotely human-like—at least not at first. It looks vaguely like the shapeless thing of Severus' mind, and for an instant, his hands shake as his heart skips a beat in fear.
What follows, however, is far worse than anything he could have dreamed.
Above, the Lumos light flickers, casting unnatural shadows over the walls. The vapor pouring out of the desk pools on the floor like smoke, or mist, and out of it rises a figure Severus knows only too well.
It is a figure that has haunted him for the last twelve years—a figure that haunted him even while she was still alive.
How fitting, then, that Lily Evans had appeared as a ghost before him.
She looked exactly like she had, that day, when Severus had found her body—had begged her to wake up until his throat bled, until he could no longer speak. It's so odd, to see her moving again, when everything about her simply screams dead.
He should cast the spell now, banish the creature back to its cell, but it's Lily—it's the closest he's been to her in almost two decades, and it's not even her.
The irony makes his heart burn, and with a violent, sharp slash of his wand and a loud snark, he throws the desk at the wall, again, and again, and again, and then does the same with the rest of the furniture in the room—chairs and another table—until all that's left of them are wooden shards on the ground, the shrapnel of a war long lost.
It's not enough, not nearly, to quell the fire in his heart or the bloodthirst in his stomach, but it's the only thing he can do. He wants to kill someone, to see blood run, but there is no blood he can spill here.
Silent and solemn, the ghost glides toward him unforgivingly. Severus' legs grow weak and he falls to his knees, chest heaving. His earlier screams still seem to echo in the room, the sound slow to fade in these stone walls.
Lily no longer looks human. There's an ethereal kind of beauty about her now, enhancing everything Severus has always loved about her, and he wants to grovel at her feet.
Anything, for a chance to have her speak to him again.
But Lily knows—she knows what he's done. She knows he's the reason why she's dead, that he told the Dark Lord the prophecy. She knows, and she hates him for it.
No, worse than that—she doesn't even care enough about him to hate him. He can see it in her eyes: they look through him as though he isn't even there, and though she keeps moving toward him, somehow, she doesn't seem to be getting any closer.
It's like she's stuck, going to him but doomed to never reach his side, and Severus' blood freezes in his veins as something breaks inside his chest.
(his heart, maybe, had he still had a heart to break)
His greatest fear is still Lily though—still the girl he loves—and it's still for her to not forgive him.
It's funny, how little his fear has truly changed compared to how much it feels like it has. And to think that once, he had thought Lily would never forgive him for insulting her—now that offense seems to benign, when in truth he has as good as killed her.
"I'm sorry," he finds himself saying. "I didn't mean for this to happen. I never wanted any of this to happen. You weren't supposed to die—he was supposed to let you live!"
The words fall from his lips like a cascade, rushing to meet the ground, and yet Lily's face stays uncaring, her emerald eyes still looking past him.
The anger starts to bubble back up in his chest, a dangerous thing that hooks itself in his lungs and pulls until he tastes copper and bile at the back of his throat.
"You're not her," he chants, rocking on himself. "You're not her."
It's true and it's not—this ghost is the closest he'll ever get to Lily again outside of his own memories, and those change, just a little, every time he tries to remember them.
(was she wearing a pink dress when he first saw her, in that Muggle park, or a blue one? Did her laugh sound like bells or was it the broken, ugly snorting sound he thinks he can still hear the echo of in his ears sometimes?)
The Lily in front of him keeps on her unrelenting pace and Severus drinks in the sight of her yet again—a man dying of thirst offered a drink, only to find out that the water's been poisoned against him. And yet, he's too thirsty to care.
He could die here, he realizes. He would die here, willingly, if only it meant he could stare at the figure forever. It's his worst fear, and just seeing it makes him sick, but he can't tear his eyes away.
It's like an addiction: it hurts, he knows it does, but he still can't stop.
He still can't stop.
(he won't stop)