In Vacant and in Pensieve Mood
"If you are ready," said Dumbledore, "if you are prepared." Just how did Snape prepare to be a basket that dangled from the arm of Lord Voldemort? And what could this possibly have to do with William Wordsworth? Missing moment from GoF.
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A/N: No, the title is not a spelling error! The line caught my eye as a daft pun, that has turned into something else!
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Severus Snape swept up the stairs from the hospital wing, careful even in his speed not to go too fast. At the top of the stairs, the foul black tail of Sirius Black was just whisking away around the corner towards the front doors, and Snape had no desire to catch up with – him. He turned and swept briskly towards the Headmaster's study. Up stairs, along deserted corridors, through a private passage or two – at least Hogwarts was, at this hour, free of the idiots who normally flooded its halls. He could go undisturbed, and there would be no-one to hear him say – Snape made a small, sophisticated shudder at the Headmaster's absurd taste in passwords. If Dumbledore had changed the password since Snape had last visited, he had not mentioned it, which meant he must say, to a smirking gargoyle – "Jammy dodgers!"
It did not put him in a good mood for facing a room full of nose-y portraits of past Headmasters and Headmistresses, all of them sitting up and taking far too much interest. Even the Slytherin ones who ought to have known better. Snape glared round at the lot of them, ignored the infuriating moue from the permanently empty portrait that Dumbledore kept for some reason, and jerked open the familiar cupboard where the strange glitters of metallic light flickered. You know what I must ask you to do, Dumbledore had said. He did indeed. How often had he done this in the past?
He set the Pensieve on the desk and took a careful breath, steadying and ordering his thoughts. Then he put his wand to his temple. The wild night on the hilltop with Dumbledore, the desolate night in the Headmaster's study – they came out first with an ease and briskness that enabled him to avoid any of the emotions which went with them. It was the ones which came after which were harder – harder again this time when he had kept them buried for almost thirteen years.
Lily. Not Lily as an entirety, which would have been much easier to pluck from his mind – also easier all round, as Snape felt such an amputation from his memory would probably have killed him, as her loss from his world almost had – but some of Lily. The most precious and treasured and painful memories of Lily.
The way she had believed him, under the trees in Spinner's End. The way she had said 'but we are friends, Sev. Best friends.' How much it had hurt the first time she had passed him without speaking, and pointedly missed his birthday. Each and every one must come out, to leave only the picture of desire and lust which was all the Dark Lord thought love could be.
By the time he was done, Snape was holding on to the edge of the desk, breathing as heavily as if he had just been subjected to the Cruciatus curse. As, no doubt, he would be shortly. Even if the Dark Lord chose to believe him. Snape paused and composed himself. Why should the Dark Lord not believe him? The servant who had remained faithfully at his post for thirteen years, not hurling himself into Azkaban in a fit of Gryffindor-like glory seeking; or rushing about making protestations of innocence and loyalty to anyone or anything. And he came with over a decade's collected information about the Dark Lord's chiefest adversary. No, there was no doubt but that he would be accepted. There would only be the matter of his delay in arriving, and that count would be settled in a few minutes.
Snape half-smiled, bitterly. It would probably be less painful than these last few minutes here in Dumbledore's study, as long as his mind was prepared. He checked through again. Nothing of his work to save Lily Potter's son; none of his discussions with Dumbledore that contained anything important, though plenty that did not; no tell-tale childhood memories of Lily-
He had missed one.
Frowning, Snape drew it out, a thin strand of silver memory so fine and faint it seemed he must have almost forgotten it completely. He lowered the thread into the Pensieve and almost despite himself swirled it into action. The surface of the liquid cleared, and Snape caught his breath. Lily's face laughed up at him. He bent over and watched – he didn't need to be immersed to know what they were saying. It had been a day in the Easter holidays when they were both 14. It had rained, and he and Lily had been doing their potions homework together at her house when the sun had suddenly broken through the clouds, filling the room and lighting Lily's hair into a thousand tints of goldish-red. And Lily had tossed that shining redness back, and slammed both their books, trapping his quill and fingers. "We can finish this any time – let's go for a walk while the sun shines! You need more sunshine, Sev," she'd added. "You're too pale. Madam Pomfrey will be after you with Pepper-up potion when we go back!"
He'd made a point of grumbling about his squashed fingers and bent quill, but he had got up: not because of the threat of Pepper-up potion, nor because sunshine was particularly attractive in itself, but because Lily in it was. He had watched her all the way, as she chatted and sparkled as only Lily could.
They had gone down to the park, and while Severus had been looking round for a discrete place to sit, Lily had suddenly spread her arms wide and cried 'Oh look! The daffodils are out!' And she had sat down right among them on the wet grass, and made Severus sit beside her – and then, just as suddenly, she had started to recite. It had been some stupid muggle poem about a lake and daffodils – but something of Lily in the sunshine had entwined into it, to make the rhythm if not the words, beautiful. And her face looked up at him now out of the Pensieve as she had looked up at the sky then, sun-lit red hair clashing horribly with the yellow daffodils about her, bright and laughing and living, and the last of the words came unbidden to Severus' mind: 'And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.'
He did not believe in Omens or Meanings or Signs. Life was too real, too bleak, too deadly for such nonsense. But if he had, perhaps that almost forgotten memory could have been pretended to be a sign. A sign that the girl who had laughed among the daffodils would have, for the first time, been proud of him today, for being the kind of Death Eater he was about to be.
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