Left With Nothing, a harry potter fanfic

Left With Nothing

"Come on, Severus, catch me if you can!"

The giggles of a six-year-old girl could be heard from across the vast-seeming playground, tinkling in the silent autumn air like little silver bells. I ran after her, pumping my scrawny legs as fast as they would go, my long, black hair flying back behind me like a wild horse's mane. Hers did the same, a flurry of red always just in front of me, just out of reach. She was a very fast little girl.

"I can't! You're too fast for me, Lily!"

"Severus Snape, you cannot hide from me!"

I stifled a giggle as she passed right by my hiding spot in the hollow of the dead oak tree. A wave of utter happiness came over me as I knew she would not find me— and it's not like that happened every day in my eight-and-a-half years of life— so I accidently did something stupid. There was a resounding bang! as the cloud of smoke slowly disappeared, leaving me sprawled on the ground a few feet away from the tree. I had blown myself straight into plain sight, using magic no less!

Lily looked down at me with amazed eyes, and I feared that I had just ruined everything in a moment of lost self-control. Never use magic in front of Muggles, my father had preached to me since my birth. I was dead. Dead.

Suddenly, she smiled. "You can do stuff too?!"

"Never!" I laughed, clutching at my aching sides uselessly. "I'll never tell my secret!"

"Then I'll force it outta you!" Lily declared, tickling my stomach again with one hand as she held me down with the other. Ten-year-old girls could be such a pain, but I loved this one with all my young heart. "Tell me, Sev!"

"Noooo!"

"Tell me!"

"F-fine. Stop it! I can't take it anymore!" Her fingers stopped their masterfully wriggling dance against my skin, and she leaned back on her knees, a smile on her pretty face.

"So, who is she?"

I sighed. I hated lying to Lily. Perhaps bragging that I had my first crush before her hadn't been such an amazing idea. So, who to choose, who to choose...?

"Tunie." She gasped, her hands flying to her mouth in mock-horror. "Yep. That's right. I have a crush on your Muggle sister. Happy now?"

"Did you get your Hogwarts letter in the mail yet?" she asked me, and I shook my head 'no.' She grinned, and held out a little envelope. "I got my first! Yes! I told you I'd get in!"

"I'll get mine too," I whined, "I'm a half-blood, and I can do stuff..."

She patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll get one. I've seen you blow stuff up, believe me, you're just as magical as I am!"

I smiled. She had no idea how wrong she was. No one was as magical as her.

"Promise you won't abandon me as soon as you make new pure-blood friends." Her lip quivered slightly, and she looked as though she were about to cry. "Come on, promise."

"I promise, okay? You're gonna be my best friend forever." She grinned, and I smiled too, just because I loved the way her green eyes lit up at my words.

"Thank you, Sev! I don't know what I'd do without you!"

She flung her arms around me in an awkward hug just as the trolley lady slid open our compartment door. I blushed bright pink, but good-ol'-confident-Lily just smiled and asked for some Bertie Bott's Every Flavoured Beans.

"I wish we were in the same house," Lily confided in me a week after sorting, as we stood by the entrance to Gryffindor house. I didn't know exactly which painting it was, because that would be against the rules— I only knew that it was around here somewhere.

"Me too," I replied almost sadly, tugging at my green-and-silver tie dejectedly. "We can't even hang out all that much, because we don't share a common room."

A Gryffindor passed by us, glaring slightly in my direction. I winced. Must everyone look at me like that?

"Do you have a window in your dormitory?"

I blinked at the odd question for a second before answering, "Yes."

"Good. Leave it open. Just... just in case I have a nightmare or something, and I need to send Fudge down for you."

"And have that bloody owl scratch me awake? No way!" She put on that little pout of hers, scrunching her face together until her eyes started watering. The last thing I wanted was a crying Lily, so I quickly said, "Okay, fine!"

She grinned.

"Move, Potter, you're blocking my sun," I heard her groan from further along the shore. I looked up from where I had been skipping rocks across the lake, only to see the jerk still looming over her. He ran a hand through his dark hair, smiling like he was Royalty.

"I am the only star here, Evans, so how could I be blocking yours?" The guy thought he owned Hogwarts since he made the stupid Quidditch team so early. Apparently over the summer, he'd just grown more arrogant.

"Stuff it, Potter. I'm not interested in your boasting." She grabbed her books from the grass and stuffed them into her bag, then jumped up and started walking briskly back toward the castle. I jogged to catch up with her, giving Potter a smirk as I passed him.

"God, I hate that guy sometimes! He just... makes my blood boil! He's always such a... such a..."

"Twelve-year-old boy?" I suggested jokingly.

"Exactly! Don't ever become one of those, okay?"

I rolled my eyes."Lily, I am one."

"Oh, you know what I mean!"

I smiled. I did know what she meant.

"Happy thirteenth birthday, Severus!" She held out a gift that was wrapped in purple, complete with little pink bow. I frowned. She never called me 'Severus' anymore, unless she was angry with me, or pretending to be. "Oh, don't be such a Gloomy Gus. Just open it!"

I tore off the paper with one hand and examined the object in the box. My frown only grew, as I reached inside and removed the object; a little white flower. "What's this?" I asked, disappointed. Lily just chuckled.

"It's a lily, Silly-Sevvie." I rolled my eyes.

"I knew that— why are you giving me a lily for my birthday?"

"Remember how I told you I was practicing my magic?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's not just any lily. It's a never-dying lily. Enchanted it myself!" She sounded proud. "I've had it for a week, and it hasn't started wilting— and it shouldn't ever, if I did the charm right. So now, wherever you go, you'll still have a little Lily with you. Get it?"

I smiled. "Thank you, Lily. I'll treasure it always."

"I would never want help from a filthy little Mudblood like her!"

I regretted the words the moment they left my mouth. The anger that flashed behind her beautiful eyes was like nothing I'd ever seen from her before. No, wait, that's untrue. I'd seen that look before. Absolutely rage. She'd had that look in her eyes right before she put the jellylegs curse on Potter, after he'd somehow stolen all my clothes and hung them random places around the school. She had been so furious with him. And now she was furious with me.

I felt so bad, all I wanted to do was apologise. I did. Over and over, for weeks on end. She never listened.

"You never really cared!" she'd say. She said it more than once. "How could you? I'm a Mudblood. You've always felt this way! I should have known not to trust a... a..." And then she said the words that broke me into a thousand pieces and threw them into the cold reality that was life, for the first time. "...A Death Eater like you!"

I left my window open, just in case, every night after that. I waited by the window hopefully, looking out at the stars and waiting for her owl to come into my line of sight, a secret note clutched sacredly in his beak, telling me to meet her in the trophy room, or behind the library, or in a corridor somewhere. No such note arrived, and I soon felt more lost than before.

I touched the little flower that sat next to me on the window sill. "Lily," I whispered, my voice lost to the wind. "I'm sorry."

"I'm getting married."

The words made my blood run cold. It was not as though I hadn't known this day would come, but the fact that she had the guts to tell me in person said a lot about her character. It said a lot about her. It told me that she hadn't changed by being with him. That made me ache for her once more, but I resisted, especially after her next words.

"I'm marrying James Potter."

Potter, how I loathed him in that moment. Why him and not me? Why did he, the stuck-up cocky bastard, get to hold and kiss and make love to and marry the woman I'd been in love with since I was a child too young to comprehend love? It wasn't fair.

"I know," I told her, my heart a heavy weight of nothing in my chest, "I've always known."

She left with a puzzled look on her face, only cutting deeper into the giant hole where my heart once lay. Now there was nothing; nothing but fragments of happy memories of us where there used to be love and a whole being. Now, there was nothing.

I put my hand in my pocket and ran a finger over the delicate petal of a flower she had long forgotten, but had never left my mind. Still, there was nothing.

"The Potters are dead," Dumbledore announced, the pain in his voice obvious. "There are preparations to be made for... Harry Potter." There were whispers around the table. The Order was stunned.

"The Potter boy? He's...?" Mad-Eye asked quietly, looking nervously at Dumbledore.

"Alive," answered the Headmaster, his eyes gleaming with a pride in this fact, "And Voldemort is, as far as we are aware— dead."

Neither fact eased the pain. Lily was still dead. As the Order went about arguing on how best to take care of the boy, I sat quiet in my seat. Lily, my Lily, was dead. But the Dark Lord was not dead. He would never be dead. Dumbledore was mistaken— He would be back, and I would forever he his servant, because of one bad choice.

I'm sorry Lily, I thought, blinking back tears, I'm so sorry. I made a bad decision— maybe if I hadn't... you'd be sitting with us at this table. And for that, I am eternally sorry.

I met Harry Potter's eyes for the first time, so much later that I thought I had forgotten. But no, his eyes were hers. He was a spitting image of the man who had stolen her from me, except for those eyes, and it was like a cruel joke.

I stared at him, unblinkingly, for a moment. He was everything I hated; James Potter, through and through; yet everything I loved. Those eyes— many a night had they haunted me in my dreams. Though they had been attached to another body, another soul, they were still the same emerald eyes. My arm suddenly burned, the Dark Mark etched into my skin lit on fire by his very presence.

After the pain subsided, my hand flew to my pocket, but there was no flower there to soothe my aching heart.

I dug through my drawers desperately, clinging to the hope that I would find it. "Come on, Severus, catch me if you can," I heard myself mumble, and my heart ached more than it had in ten years. "Severus Snape, you cannot hide from me!"

Every pocket was searched, every box, every corner of my closet and my room; and yet, I could not find it. 'I'll treasure it always,' I had told her. Somewhere deep inside me, I had kept that promise. But outwardly, I had been a servant to the Dark Lord. I had been a Death Eater, just as she had so coldly predicted. And in the time that I lost myself in the Dark, I had lost the only thing I had left of her; that flower.

"Lily, sweet Lily, I'm sorry," I sobbed, digging through another box of my things that had been shoved away under my bed. "I'm sorry!"

But no matter how many times I apologised, I knew she could not hear me, and I also knew that if she could, she wouldn't be listening. And I never found my flower.

I lay dying, bleeding, and I told him all that I could. Those green eyes, so like his mothers, looked upon for once without hatred— I had never hated him as I so wished I could, and as I so pretended. But I could not, for Lily lived on in him. In his blood, his kindness, his heart, and his gentle nature— as well as in those green eyes.

And so I gave him my memories. These memories, and others. I wanted him to know why I had done the things I did, and how mistaken he had been sometimes; I never hated him, though I wanted to.

I died looking into those green eyes. For the last second, I thought they were hers. Lily. My Lily.

But still, I died with nothing.

Harry gasped, tears in his eyes as he was thrown unceremoniously from Snape's memories, back into the chair at his desk. How had he not seen that there had been so much more to his old professor? How had he not noticed the pain in his dark eyes while the man had been alive? A lump formed in his throat, just as it had the first time he had walked through the tangled fragments of Severus Snape's unfortunate life.

"Harry, are you alright?" Ginny was looking down at him, her red hair a tangled mess framing her tired face. She'd just woken up.

"I'm fine," Harry managed, forcing down all the sudden emotions that were writhing like snakes in the pit of his stomach. "Just... go back to bed, sweetheart. I'll be up in a minute."

"Okay." She yawned and bent down to peck him on the cheek before leaving him to his quiet study again. "Good-night."

Harry folded his shaking hands in his lap, sighing deeply. "I think she forgave you, Snape," he whispered to the still air of the house, "I really do. I sure do. It's not fair, how some people have everything, and better people, who had all the right intentions, are left with nothing." His words echoed around the empty room. "You were left with nothing at all, and for that, I'm sorry."

"I'll be back in a second, Ginny!" Harry called over his shoulder, jogging over to the graves. He made sure that Severus was buried here, right next to his parents. In his hands he held two daffodils, which he quickly laid on his mother and father's graves.

He dug around in his pocket, and pulled out a small flower. It was a white lily, exactly like the one that his mother had given her best friend so many years ago. "I enchanted it myself," he said casually, chuckling to a private joke that only he and the two dead people just below where his feet stood on the frozen ground would understand.

He put the lily against the last grave, smiling with contentment as he jogged back to his wife-to-be, because he knew deep down that Severus would have something to hold onto now, even if it was in death. As their car drove away from the graveyard, a strong gust of wind blew through it, knocking the daffodils off the graves of his parents. But the lily, resting atop the cool stone of the former Headmaster's grave, stayed delicately poised on the edge, not moving at all.

Forever.