Chapter 1
…and then she walked away."
Severus Snape put his quill down and moved his diary to the side. Fastidious as he was, he did not want tear drops to smudge the fresh ink. Sitting up on the couch, he heaved what must have been the fifth sob of his entire life, and at least 4 of the previous had happened within the last 2 days since aforementioned she had aforementionedly walked away.
A box of tissues helpfully popped into existence on the table next to him. Of course, he thought, dully, blowing his nose and discarding the tissue in the newly-existing wastepaper bin at his feet, The manuscript of Merlin's lost prophecy? Impossible. A box of Kleenex? The Room of Requirement happily obliges. Severus looked around his favorite study haunt, and noticed that while it still contained a perfectly level desk (an endangered species in a school as old as Hogwarts), an assortment of his favorite raven feather quills, and endless bottles of never-blot ink, now it had very subtly (or so it thought) tried to be as comforting as possible without making it obvious enough to anger the boy it had learned was proud about these sorts of things. The room's potion ingredients cabinet was now very prominently displaying the ingredients to a Perk Poultice, and it had casually slipped a new book into his usual stack of textbooks, entitled Reparo Heart: The Smart Wizard's Guide to Getting Back on the Broom. Ordinarily Severus would have yelled at the room for its impertinence (and, while he was at it, for the casually placed shampoo bottles he'd been finding here and there), but at the moment he had other things on his mind. He had been reliving those last moments over and over again in his mind, as well as that day on the lakeside when that accursed word had escaped him—pressed from him after years of torment from James, he was sure.
If only he could have told Lily one of the thousand responses that had occurred to him since her horrible accusations. If only he could have been told of the events on the lakeside before they had happened. If only he would have known of this whole mess.
Severus moved to recline on the couch, but something caught his eye as he was lying down. He sat up. It was the potion ingredients cabinet; it was now prominently placing an entirely different set of ingredients for a potion he did not recognize. He was about to brush it off as some other insipid gesture on the room's behalf, when he spotted a peculiar item next to the ingredients: an empty hourglass.
Severus Snape prided himself on being a very rational 15-year-old. He was not the type to wait for hours outside Flourish and Blott's for a book he knew would be just as good and half as cheap 6 months later. He never bothered with worthless hobbies like Quidditch when he could train himself to enjoy useful leisurely activities like potions making. He knew that time-turners were notoriously unhelpful and often harmful when used to change large, important past events. However, as love and grief are many things and none of them are logical, Severus Snape promptly set to work building a time-turner.