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Dear Severus Snape,

Five little words. Five little words was all it took for you to break the heart I didn't know you held in your hands. "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!" you said as I tried to help you… "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!" as you were finally let down form the throes of Potter's spell work… "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!" No matter how fast I ran, those words chased me. I ran blindly, not knowing what road I had taken, what destruction I was running to, only knowing what I was running from. "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!"

Only then did I realize that I left my broken and bruised heart, lying in the ground at your feet. By then you had tried multiple times to take the words back. Without knowing why I clung to those words, I wouldn't let you have them back. For them to slip out of your mouth, someone who loved me so much, who I loved back with almost equal fervor. You must have meant them. They must have been the truth. Regardless of how many times you told me they weren't the truth, I started to believe them. Those five little words. They were almost the end of me.

My blood must have been dirty, muddy, filled with filth. That summer I started draining the blood from my arms, but I never saw the mud in it. It didn't matter. The pain helped me forget those five little words, for as long as the marks hurt. It got me through the next year and a half.

But pain is a funny thing, eventually you build up tolerance to it. The marks stopped hurting, and the words came back. "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!"

One day I lost it. The words became too loud. I locked myself in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. My back against the door, I made the marks deeper than I ever did before. I watched the blood fall off my wrists, then blacked out.

I woke up in the Hospital Wing, Potter at my side. Then I noticed that you weren't there. All the other times I had landed myself in one of these confounded beds, you were there. Today you weren't. I wondered why, then I remembered those five little words. "…filthy little Mudbloods like her!" I knew then what had happened, what the truth was, That people say things in fits of anger that they ultimately don't mean. I remember doing that with Petunia all the time, she always forgave me. I decided it was time to shove my dignity down the toilet and forgive you. I asked Potter where you were, that I wanted to talk to you.

He was angered by my request, I could tell. But he went out to find you anyway. As he told me that you refused to come, what you had become, I saw the side of him that most people never saw. The kind and caring side. That he chose to hide behind his conceited and pig=headed toe-raggedness. He told me that you had become one of the crowd that he always knew you would follow. And I always tried to keep you out of.

I knew all the chance of forgiveness, repaired hearts, and finally being together the way I knew we should had gone down the same toilet I had just tried to shove my dignity down, only much earlier. The end result was clogging the toilet, so my dignity was just floating on the top. I picked it back up knowing that once you were in the group, the one I tried to keep you out of, and you never truly wanted in, there was no escape. I picked my dignity up and fixed it the way I would never be able to fix my heart. It still laid outside of the common room at the bottom of the Fat Lady's portrait, where we had spoken last those years ago, Or I thought it had, until Potter offered it back to me, or what was left of it at least.

I took it from him and fused my waterlogged dignity to it, although it still wasn't enough to fill the hole that those five words had caused, the hole I had allowed the words to cause. Knowing that once you were in, you were in, and I couldn't pull you back out I settled for second best. The second and last man who had ever been able to even touch my heart. I settled for Potter, who at best could be compared to Juliet's Paris or… I don't know. All I really know is that you were my first choice, and would always be my first choice.

Then we had a child, Potter and I. By the name of Harry James Potter. The name Harry was a tribute to you, truly. Somewhere around the fifth month I remembered the name we used to call Potter in secret. Hairy J P, so concerned abut his hair because it was the only thing hiding the fact he didn't have a brain. We always said that true geniuses didn't care how their hair looked, like Einstein. I learned later that we were wrong.

Potter was actually very smart. One day he told me why he chose to pick on you so. Not because you were Slytherin, not because you were a "greasy slime ball", but because you were friends with the only girl that wouldn't look his way any more than absolutely necessary to continue with life. He hadn't been used to girls not being interested in him, even in first year. He chased me to gain a conquest, it was only later that he "truly realized" who I was. That I was the only girl who could ever "hold his heart".

That was on Harry's first birthday. And suffice to say it caused the ruination of our marriage. The only reason we stayed together after that was the protection of Harry from Voldemort.

I have put a spell on this letter to be delivered to you at the point of my death. Hopefully it will never need to be sent to you, that I can beg for forgiveness from you on my own two knees instead of having you read my apology from beyond the grave. Because I know that we will never be allowed to be together, if you're still with the death eaters, and I'm still in hiding with Potter who gets more annoying and irritating every single day we are stuck in this same house.

I love you Sev.

Love,

Lily Potter... No

Lily Evans... No

Lily Snape

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The man finished reading the letter and slid it back into the envelope. A tear slid down his cheek when he realized the monstrous mistake he had made. Her life might, no would have been much different, much better, if he hadn't have said what he said. Well, there was no changing that fateful day now, The day where he had merely stood outside the Hospital Wing instead of going and finding the only Slytherin that had so far evaded the throes of the Deatheaters.