Sentinel
A bit of Potterwholock angst… the word "sentinel" caught my fancy when I heard it in Les Mis and this popped into my head. I plan on doing one chapter on each work, starting with Snape. Enjoy! (and review!)
.
.
Severus hadn't wanted to come back.
Oh, he knew he wasn't really Severus Snape, Potions Master, Death Eater, all of that. Severus Snape was dead. He was just a strip of enchanted canvas hanging on a wall—but still, he hadn't wanted to come back.
It was a complicated thing. He was, to all intents and purposes, the man he had been painted to be—the same memories, the same personality, the same sarcastic sense of humor. But he knew that he was only an artificial copy and nothing waited for him beyond long years in an office. Perhaps someday there would be a fire, or someone would decide they didn't want Hogwarts' most infamous Headmaster looking his hooked nose at them, and he would be removed, just blink out like a candle flame, like the illusion he was.
The wizards had no idea what they were doing, creating portraits. They had no idea what it was like to be an artificial soul existing in nonexistence.
Severus Snape had been a bitter man, and so was his portrait.
McGonagall refused to talk to him for the better part of a year, until at last he made one sneering comment too many and she threw her tea at him. The canvas cleaning had been unpleasant, but it seemed to have drawn something out of her and she spoke to him on occasion after that.
Now she slept in a portrait next to him as he looked down on the darkened office—except she didn't, really, because Professor McGonagall was dead. Snape didn't know what he believed about an afterlife—on one hand, he was far too cynical to let such a simpering notion slide… but on the other, he couldn't imagine a heaven that wouldn't have a place for Lily.
Whose imbecilic notion was it, to let portraits feel pain?
The other portraits slept to pass the time, but Snape had never slept much, preferring to prowl the hallways in search of erstwhile students. It had done him no good while he was alive, and it did him even less good now. If he found the Mirror of Erised now, he wondered, would it even acknowledge his existence? Or would it just remain blank, rippling slightly, reflecting an empty room?
He did sleep eventually, in the painted chair where he spent his life. When he woke again, sunlight was throwing shafts of light onto the floor, and nothing had changed.
How did it ever come to this, he thought, as he always did, watching the Headmaster take his place behind the desk. Lee Jordan, Headmaster. Merlin help us.
The students and professors practically shouted his praises, and even Snape had to admit the boy had a certain… spark. But a quidditch announcer, headmaster? It didn't bear thinking about.
Snape didn't look up as the door opened, pretending to be immersed in Euphraxia's rather dull book on poltergeists.
"You asked to see me, professor?"
The voice was strangely familiar. Snape looked up, brow furrowing, and the book fell from his hand.
It was Lily. It was Lily as he had first seen her, Lily before age put an edge on her smile, before her eyes turned cold when she saw him.
Her eyes. Her eyes were the wrong color. And now that he looked closer there was a bit of roundness to her face that his Lily had never had, a slight dimple in her cheek that he had never seen.
"Lily," Jordan said sternly. Snape leaned back in his chair, holding himself in check, letting his breath out raggedly. "I hear you've been fighting."
"No, sir," she said, the picture of innocence. Her voice cut right through him. "It was James who was fighting. I just got in the way."
What was happening? Snape found himself caught off guard for the first time in decades. How could such ghosts rise to haunt him?
"You got in the way?" Jordan's voice held a tinge of surprise. "How?"
"I was blocking James' Tarantallegra," she said sincerely. "Sir," she added as an afterthought.
"Why were you doing that?" All traces of sternness had fallen off of the headmaster's face—he now just looked bemused.
"Scorpius didn't do anything to James, and I didn't want him hexed."
What sort of idiot would name their child Scorpius? Snape thought. As he looked down at this girl, he counted backwards mentally, figuring all the years he had spent in his portrait. Yes, about twenty years had passed – and now the children of his students were coming to Hogwarts. Bloody hell.
They had continued talking while he was thinking, and now this Lily—the wrong Lily—was standing.
"See it doesn't happen again, Miss Potter," Jordan said, the stern headmaster once more aside from the twitching of a corner of his mouth.
"Yes, sir," she said. "Only I think you should talk to James about it, sir."
"I will do so," Jordan said gravely. "Now off with you."
The door shut behind her.
Another Lily, and she's still a Potter, Snape thought dully.
"Severus?"
Snape gritted his teeth. "Yes, Albus?"
The damnable old man looked over at him over his half-moon glasses.
"You seem perturbed."
"Really," he said, imbuing the word with as much disdain as he could muster.
"She is the very image of her grandmother—"
"Leave it be, Albus," he said harshly. The other portraits hastily looked away as his eyes swept over the room, and he stood in a billow of robes. For the first time in two decades, he left his portrait, leaving the headmaster, the office, and the dead canvases behind him.
There was something terribly cruel about knowing that Severus Snape—the real, living, breathing Severus Snape—was long gone and he was still here, a bloody strip of canvas, splitting in two over ghosts that weren't even his.
Don't forget to review!