Disclaimer: Harry Potter & company do not belong to me.
A/N: This is a brief vignette that I actually wrote almost immediately following the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I'm only just now getting around to posting it up. Many thanks to Scion of Kushiel for beta-reading this for me, and, might I add, everyone should go read her fantastic story "Nocturne"! That being said, there are some DH spoilers contained in this fic, so if you've not finished reading it...well, shame on you, for reading fanfiction before you've even had done with the real thing!
TRANSCENDENCE
PART I
AD LUCEM
- - - - -
"What if you slept?
And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed?"
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- - - - -
Light.
It does not belong here, in this cool and velvet place behind his eyelids, where he knows – he knows – he knows that just moments before there was nothing but shadows and welcoming black.
Fractures. Splinters. Light.
It blazes through the darkness, pinholes and jagged slices of silver-white, puncturing the silky, slate expanse of his mind like a fistful of needles, of whispers, of rain. Fragments of glass tear apart his smooth consistency; and no – no – no, he liked it better not-like-this, liked it better how it was, with only the merciful sleek veil of smoke across his thoughts, before all this brightness came bleeding through...
It was softer then. It was neither sweet nor gentle, but there was a flushed grey roundness, a silent, all-enveloping relief – not so tender as to beg objection from that corner of his soul that festers still with guilt (why guilt? what for? he cannot quite remember, and yet, cannot forget – ), but cold and crisp, promising of a half-forgiveness that his conscience yields to bear.
And now –
Blinking, squinting; lashes flutter, and skin peels back to enable the vision of two eyes, yellow-white and red-veined, with their sloe-black centers glistening dimly in this new light. The world swims before him: he frowns as he peers through the muddled tapestry of bright and dark and grey in-between, webs of glittering luminescence sprawling across the sloping curve of obscurity.
His hands rise (of their own accord, it seems) to press the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. There is the darkness, again, so perfect and complete –
His hands lower away from his face, and a whistling sigh slips past his lips as he blinks, one final time, and attempts to make sense of the light-riddled grey.
Billows of cloud, thunder-dark, stretch away from where he kneels (why is he kneeling? he was so convinced of lying down), for as far as he can see; the ground (is there a ground?) is blanketed in them, and the sky above is correspondingly bleak. But there –
His thin lips purse, his keen eyes narrow, and he looks – he looks – he looks –
The coils of mist are taking shape, condensing into something foreign and unknown, and yet, at once familiar –
It is a swing set.
And in this moment, Severus Snape remembers his name.
His eyes travel the iron poles, up from their roots fixed firmly into the soil which is appearing even as he watches, across the supporting beam that bridges the top. His gaze trickles down the two long pairs of chains, slides over the two wooden planks that serve as seats, drops to the hollows beneath each swing that mark the twin places where small feet have kicked countless children into the sky.
The real swing set, Severus recalls suddenly, had three swings. Yet that fact seems to him to be strangely irrelevant here.
He stares a little harder, his eyes sifting through the shadows behind and around the swings; in the distance he can make out the vague contours of a slide, a teeter-totter, a sandbox. These all are faint, dim, half-formed and unclear in the phantom light of this insubstantial place –
And Severus realizes, looking down at himself, that he too is only quasi-solid, for he is very certainly there and he is tangible and he is steady, but yet there is a wavering, a flickering – as if, upon turning away, he might only glance back from the corner of his eye, and by this he would surely see right through his own skin –
Only the swing set looks to stand truly corporeal, and as Severus fastens his gaze once more upon it, he is strangely unsurprised to find that a girl is now perched upon one of the wooden board-seats.
She is young and slight, her shoulders still thin, her knees still knobbly in the charming inelegance of childhood. She is wearing a long white cotton nightshirt, and the sleeves are broad and trailing around the small fists that clutch the swinging chains, and the hem falls to lie a scant few inches above her ankles. Her toes scarcely touch the ground, but she is swaying slowly forward and back on the little swing, and she is humming, softly, an off-key song that strikes painful, heartrending chords in Severus's memory. There is a smudge of dirt on her nose.
Her hair is dazzlingly red, and her eyes are an astounding, piercing green. These are the only colors that Severus can find in this grey-scaled not-world. His lips curve upwards into the barest admittance of a smile.
Severus clambers to his feet, realizing as he does so that he, too, wears a white cotton nightshirt, identical to the girl's. He takes a step towards the swings, then another – and as he moves, the shirt grows longer and looser upon him, the hem crawling down from mid-thigh to pass his knees and amble along his shins until he, too, is standing, scrawny and spare, in a nightshirt several sizes too large for his now-youthful frame.
The girl's swinging slackens to a halt, and she stares at him, her green gaze unblinking. Severus's eyes are now exactly on a level with hers.
He eases himself onto the vacant swing, the coarse wood a ready comfort beneath his weight. He pushes off, hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence as the girl on his right shifts to match his pace. She is still humming.
A swathe of darkness falls promptly over his eyes, soft and textile, and for one wild instant Severus thinks it is the Sorting Hat – but his hand whips up to snatch the pointed cloth from his head, and looking at it he sees that it is a sleeping cap, cornflower-blue and patterned over with yellow stars. He glances to his right, and he sees that the girl, too, now wears a cap, the limp peak drooping over her shoulder. The fabric of her hat is emerald green.
Severus tugs the cap back onto his head, and it slips down his lank hair to lie again over his eyes, and he closes them gratefully against the blackness of the lining. Emblazoned upon his eyelids are the green eyes, the red hair, the smudged nose.
Severus smiles, and he tilts back his head, listening to Lily Evans's humming. Oblivion tugs at his blithe, unburdened mind, and he allows his thoughts to sink into unconsciousness.
Severus Snape sleeps, and here – in this place of no time and no thought and no concrete reality – he can swing and swing forever.