Author's Note: Always wanted to try my hand at the old Peggy Sue Snapefic. I've always been bothered by the frankly abusive dynamics of most Snape/Lily fanfics, so here's my attempt at portraying Snape trying for balance. He never really got a chance to grow up and get closure from Hogwarts-so I'm using fanfic to give him a chance.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything about this story but the framing and styling of the narrative. Up-All-Night Potion comes from rabbit-and-jinx, I think, "If Ewe Be Prepared."
Content Warning: Discussion of Sirius Black's comment, "Lucius' lapdog." No pedophilia, but mention of pedophilia and sexual assault.

They Call This Closure?

Severus opened his eyes, suddenly wrenched upside-down by the familiar tug of a Levicorpus spell. His thoughts immediately went to Lupin, to Black, they must have told fucking Potter. He thought suddenly, sharply, Liberacorpus! and rolled smoothly onto his feet, wand out, as he reached the ground once more.

"Potter!" he barked. "Your wand!" A wordless disarming spell had it neatly in his hand, he needed to hand it to the Headmaster to show him proof of Potter's irascibility, he could definitely get that fucking brat expelled and hopefully banished to Grimmauld Place, where he would be safe and out of his hair. When his lackeys began to sputter-sounding like the Weasleys, it must be the Twin Terrors-he whirled around and was faced with a sixteen-year-old Sirius Black. Fucking Padfoot, Potter must have Floo'd him somehow and summoned him here-what were they going to do about Umbridge?

"Oh, what the fuck," he said. Then Potter jumped on his back, and Severus busied himself with slamming his suddenly-revived enemy's face into the lovely spring grass of the Hogwarts lawn. He had dreamed of this moment. Mostly it ended with him being stripped and his penis falling off, but this was a nice new twist. He punched Potter, just because he felt like it. Black shot a stinging hex at him, and he blocked it lazily. Now he was having fun.

"Sev!" a heartbreakingly familiar voice called. "Leave them alone, you're better than this!" Severus whirled around and gaped. Lily Evans sat there, face aflame with rage. The sun made her eyes glitter-was she tearing up? Merlin save him.

"What the fuck," Severus repeated. Maybe she would strip. He inspected her: no, still sixteen. They only went sexual when she appeared closer to his age. Wary, he took a step back, right into Black's headlock, and when Potter jumped to help in he knew no more.

He woke up in the Hospital Wing, sore and displeased. He did not feel like he had just been tortured, had Longbottom blown up another cauldron and he wasn't quick enough with a vanishing spell? He kept his eyes closed, checking first if he had all his limbs, then gingerly lifted his hands to check his face. Pulling himself to sit, he opened his eyes, moving his jaw. It felt strange.

"Madam Pomfrey took care of your teeth pretty well, Sev," Lily commented.

Severus stared. She was still sixteen. Good Lord, this was no fun. He tried to will her older: no change. So much for a nice Muggle pornography scene. She wasn't even showing cleavage.

"You alright?" Lily slid off the chair and leaned towards him. The concern in her eyes was touching.

"What?" Severus blinked. She touched his forehead lightly, avoiding his hair. He felt the touch as if it were real, and, embarrassingly, shivered. "Longbottom must have substituted the powdered mugwort with claviceps-rye." He looked around. "A tincture of valerian should counter any tremors-"

"What's Frank have to do with this?" Lily demanded. "Honestly, Sev, you're talking nonsense. Sit down! You're lucky McGonagall came in when Potter stepped in on your face, I was afraid what they'd expel you if they saw you punching him-"

"Normally you're less chatty than this," Severus commented distractedly, pushing her away and heading straight to the medicine cabinet. "Passionflower? It would compliment the ergot." He stared at the ordering of the potions. None of them were labeled with his handwriting. She couldn't have used up his stock that quickly, they were barely a month into the school year.

Behind him he heard Lily huff. "Severus, listen to me! Sit back down! You're the one being-chatty. That concussion must have whacked the sense out of you." Slowly, Severus turned around. Astonishment lit his eyes and softened his features. He held a hand out to touch her.

"This is real," he breathed, grasping her arm. He laughed. "Or Longbottom's outdone himself. I could market this!"

Lily pinched him and snapped her fingers in his face. "You really do need that valerian," she decided. "You're being weird."

Severus took hold of both her arms. "Does a man dream he is a butterfly or is he a butterfly dreaming that he is a man dreaming?"

"Weird," Lily sighed, "why do you always get this weird when you've been fighting? Were you brewing before the test? You know Up-All-Night potion could count as cheating, right?" She narrowed her glorious eyes. "It's never made you hallucinate before. Or chatter. What were you saying about passionflower? Leaf or root?"

He hugged her. Alarmed, she pulled back. "Okay, we need to get Madam Pomfrey to do a full scan. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"I'm alive," he breathed. "I've got a chance."

Lily's expression suddenly turned from suspicious to empathetic. "Oh, Severus." She maneuvered him back to the bed. Dumbly, he let her. "That toerag must've gotten to you. You don't deserve all this shit, you know. Existing shouldn't be a punishment."

Severus stretched back onto the bed, head in his arms, and let her lecture him. He couldn't stop a small smile from playing on his lips as he watched her first try to give him a pep talk, then diagnose him, then just rant about how stupid Potter and his gang were. The rant was interspersed with references on how much more maturely he acted than they did: he hoped so, he was thirty-six and though often accused of pettiness, did try to act like an adult. He wondered if he should be concerned that a sixteen-year-old girl just told him she was glad he was acting her age. Then he realized: fuck, he was a teenager again.

Poppy stepped in. "What did you do this time?" she snapped.

"I'm a teenager," Severus said dolefully.

"I think he's hallucinating," Lily said. "He said something about passionflower and ergot, but he won't say if it's leaf or root. Er, and claviceps-infected rye. James Potter hit him rather hard and Sirius Black choked him badly."

Poppy huffed. "Well, he's not concussed, I've checked for that. Stay where you are!" Severus had been trying to slip off the bed unnoticed.

He scowled. "If I'm not concussed, why am I here?"

"You haven't been taking any potions in preparation for your exams?"

Severus stared at her flatly. If he had, would he tell her? "Nothing but Up-All-Night Potion and a couple amphetamines."

"What amphetamines?"

Severus grabbed his bag and slipped away, wand in his hand. He left the Hospital Wing and walked the corridors, cheap leather boots slapping the cobbles. There was a hole worn under his right toe, but luckily his socks were darned well, so he could not feel the cold. Head high, shoulders back, he ignored the whispers and giggles of the portraits, the odd looks from passing students and ghosts.

"Ooh, you look like you've got your knickers twisted right up your arse, Snivellus, has Lucius Malfoy told you he's dropping you for Narcissa? I heard she gives better head," sneered a Gryffindor girl, a younger Marlene McKinnon. Severus halted. He had last seen her in Rabastan Lestrange's wine cellar in 1979, Petrified and stuck to a target. Rabastan, Regulus, and Crouch, in typical elite excess, had been shooting champagne corks at her, charming them to lacerate when they hit skin. She had died of blood loss. He had been tasked with disposing of the body. He had left her on the beach in Allonby. Avery had cast the Mark.

Then he processed what she said. Why did everyone assume he was fucking Lucius? Lucius had been fifteen and Severus eleven when they met, people were disgusting. Severus remarked, "I wonder about your House's fixation on my sexual habits, particularly on insisting on these allegations of child sexual abuse-because, since you care so much, if Lucius and I had been involved while he was at Hogwarts, it would have been by definition statutory rape. I...acknowledge your concern for any distress you think I would have if my hypothetical rapist dropped me for a witch his own age, but must request that you STOP BEING FUCKING DISGUSTING, do you think rape is funny? Do you really take rape so lightly, to be accusing people so publicly?" Marlene was spooked, backing away. Severus continued, "Really, I wonder at your spirit of victim-blaming, too. Lucius was fifteen and I was eleven when we met, I was fucking thirteen when he left Hogwarts. But," he sneered, "I will let Lucius and Narcissa know about your interest." Marlene was staring at him. A collection of medieval maidens were all crouching at the bottom of their frame, to listen better. He scowled again. "Now fuck off."

Of course his stride had changed in the twenty years since he had been a student and learned to be an authority figure, since he had dabbled in murder and mastered intimidation. He had spent his schooldays nervy and nervous, head bowed, eyes ceaselessly searching for danger, drinking too much coffee and eating too little. He felt sick, remembering the rumors that had got about-Lucius' little lapdog lapping up treats was the worst, but there was one that his father had been an Inferius, another that his mother was a vampire, another that he washed his hair with his own sweat and washed his teeth with urine. Black had spread most of them, Potter laughing them into credibility. He snarled at a trio of first year Ravenclaws that were blocking his way towards his quarters; they scattered, terrified. He hated that rumor about him and Lucius. Slytherin was very careful about protecting its younger students; God, he remembered that horrible investigation in 1987 about one of his Slytherin first years and a Ravenclaw sixth year with a taste for dark magic and tantric sex. He had to call in a favor from Horace to force Filius to pressure Dumbledore into expelling the student. Pomona, at least, had helped in arranging counselling for his first year-Merlin, it was awful.

Severus slowed at the tucked-away dead end that lead to his quarters."Valerian and wormwood," he said to the suit of armor, that acted as his gatekeeper. It lifted its visor, to mime taking a closer look at him. He scowled: fifth year, right. Fuck.

"Sev!" It was Lily, still sixteen, huffing as she hurried down the corridor. He regarded her dolefully. In his dreams, she made a beautiful adult woman. She was still a remarkably pretty girl. She hadn't had a chance to become a beautiful adult woman. His fault, his fault, always. She skittered to a stop in front of him. "Jesus, Severus, you really rushed out of there. You really freaked Marlene out-I told her off, for spreading that dreadful lie-but Up-All-Night Potion? You know that doesn't exist, right?"

"Doesn't exist, yet," he said wistfully: an old joke. "For now, coffee will suffice."

"Yeah, well, the tea they serve here is shit," Lily scowled. "Watery and weak. As if we don't have exams." She grabbed his arm; he flinched back. "But, seriously, are you alright? You know Potter's a toerag-"

"I feel like a thirty-six year old man in a sixteen year old's body," Severus said. "Do we have any more exams?"

"Oh, come on, you can't be that out of it, DADA's the last-but, really, Sev, what's gotten into you? I've never seen you walk so-boldly in the halls. You normally-well-creep."

Severus felt himself crumble suddenly. He slid against the wall and hid his face in hands, hair swinging to obscure his face. What happened to his Occlumency? Oh, right, puberty. "Lily, why aren't you with your girlfriends right now? You followed them after the test." He had obsessed over that day, over how she had ignored him up until he'd made a spectacle of himself, and then smirked when he had his pants down-almost literally.

"Well, that's because you're a right bitch to be around after tests, obsessing over your answers, you know it drives me mad." She was starting to sound cross rather than concerned. "And I have a right to spend my time with whomever I wish, whenever I please, you really don't have the place to sneer at me for being with my other friends, you're always with...Mulciber and that crowd."

"Well, you're always with Potter and that gang," Severus snapped.

"We're in the same House! And he's obsessed with me!"

"Well, same with me!" To his horror, his voice broke. "I wish I could fucking avoid them now, you're right, they're disgusting people. But I sleep in the same room as them, Lily. Potter only teases you. Mulciber would snap my wand if he didn't think he could use it." He had thought up these excuses, agonized over them. "And Avery's a decent guy. Mulciber's the violent one."

"What, like the Sirius Black to my James Potter?"

"I wish you wouldn't say 'my James Potter.'"

"Why?"

Severus looked at her, her heavy dark red hair, her impossibly green eyes, her impossibly young face. It was so unformed. He wanted to just touch it, platonically, lovingly, in awe of its innocence."I felt that-that you've been flirting with him, sometimes." Sometimes he had wanted to slap it. "When he's been-bothering me." So incoherent, what was he, sixteen again? Apparently.

Lily went very still. "You're jealous," she said quietly.

"You deserve better than him," he said, "than him harassing you, than him harassing me to get to you-and sometimes I'm afraid it's working. I...care for you a great deal, Lily. You've always seen the best in me. But if you can see it in me, you can see it in him too."

"It'd be a real shit thing to do, going out with the guy who bullies my childhood best friend."

Yes, Severus thought, it would be. It had been. It had been such a shitty thing to do, to hammer in how worthless she considered him. They fell silent. A couple students passed by, chatting about exams. A ghost-the Bloody Baron-glided past, glancing at them as he went.

"Mary thinks you fancy me," Lily remarked.

His heart leapt. Bloody hell, she was sixteen. He was sixteen. Normally, if a student was so presumptuous to attempt to tease a feeling out of his, he would snarl them into celibacy and feelings of disgust and inadequacy for three years. Tulip Parkinson still hadn't gotten married, and she was in her mid-twenties now-in the future-whenever. Was he in an alternate universe?

"What do you think?" he grunted.

"I think you fancy me better than I actually am."

"Probably." He had happily idealized her in their youth, hated her in his young adulthood, and pitied her when he finally felt grown. Had he loved her? "I don't know if I love you, though."

"Too judgemental and naive?"

"Do you love me?"

"Of course I do. I've known you since we were eight. But that doesn't mean I like you most of the time. Just some of it."

"I'm not evil," he said. "I'm an arsehole. I hate it here." He was crumbling again. "I hate it here at Hogwarts, I want to leave, I'm wasting away here-this place is killing me, Lily, killing me." He grabbed her hand. She looked frightened, but let him hold onto her. "I'm so out of my depth, I'm going to fail you, I can't stand the Potter brat, I'm terrified they're going to find out, or that they're going to think I'm playing both sides, that Dumbledore will believe them and leave me high and dry, I don't want to die! I don't want to go to Azkaban!" He was hyperventilating now. "I want to get the fuck out of here, go to the States, Australia, New Zealand, India-I had apprenticeships! Offers! I had a chance, and I threw it away, they took it from me, I couldn't get it back." He released her abruptly. "Now I don't know what to do."

"Sev," Lily said gently, "do you want a Calming Potion?"

To his horror, he began to cry. "They call this closure?" he wept.