At the insistent knock, Snape admitted the hooded stranger. Realizing who it was, he turned away despondently.
"What do you want?"
It wasn't so much a question as an accusation.
"Sev, I- I just came to explain-"
Snape turned on her, his cloak billowing, anger in every gesture.
"There's nothing to explain. Tomorrow you will marry a man who takes pleasure in the pain of others. A conceited, arrogant, cruel-" He turned away again. His hand clutched the back of a chair, the knuckles gleaming white. His harsh tone became gentle, the words almost a whisper. "He's unworthy of you, Lily."
She put a hand on his shoulder; he winced as if her touch pained him."Severus," she paused. "Severus, I'm doing it as a cover. Dumbledore thinks it's best. It couldn't work for us, Sev. I'm in the Order, and you're- You're a Death Eater!" She spat the words as if they tasted foul in her mouth. That is unworthy of you."
Snape turned around to face her. "You know I don't want it. I would leave it in a moment if I could. But what good would it do? I would only mean death. For me, and," he took a deep breath. "for those I love." He looked down, unable to meet her gaze.
She took his hand in hers and looked up at him earnestly. "Go to Dumbledore. Work for the Order. He will welcome you back. He knows you as I do."
"He couldn't take me back. Not in a thousand years. He thinks I'm a despicable specimen of humanity. And who knows," he gave a laugh that was intended to be cynical, but came out despairing. "He's right."
Neither could speak for a moment, Snape filled with self-disgust, Lily unable to find the right words.
Finally, "Severus," She put her hands to his face and forced him to look her in the face. "I came, because James Potter will never have my heart. You must know that."
He forgot to breath for a moment with Lily's eyes locked on his, then gave a small, joyless smile. "I think, somewhere, I must have."
Tilting her face to his, he kissed her. Time stopped. Lily's breath caught in her throat, and they both stood frozen, their faces inches apart, unable to hear anything but their own breathing, unable to feel anything but the warm, suddenly intoxicating presence of the other.
They had set in motion something that had been a long time coming. But it was bittersweet and each wept when it was over, knowing it would be the only time.
*********
Twelve Years Later
Severus Snape sat at the high table idly scanning the crowd of students in the Great Hall, trying to ignore whatever it was that Quirrel was chattering at him. Stammering imbecile. Most of the students were seated at the house tables, greedily awaiting the lavish feast they knew was to come. The green first years stood in a huddle at the front of the hall, anxiously awaiting the sorting that would decide their fates.
Something snagged Snape's eye in it's sweep across the crowd. A familiar face. Where?
There, in the crowd of first years. He felt as if the breath had been sucked from his body. Time slowed and stopped as he realized that his gaze had been arrested by her eyes staring out at him from the crowd. Lily's green eyes.
All these years he'd held that one hope. The vain, ephemeral fantasy that the Boy Who Lived has been his own flesh and blood. It would have been, perhaps, the last thing that could have saved him. He'd even been told that they boy had black hair. If not Lily's muted red, it had been a fifty-fifty chance between his genes and James Potter's. And just as Jame's Potter had beat him in everything else, in friends, in love, now his genes had been beaten out by Potter's.
But there was no reedy sallowness about the boy, underfed though he might be. Just as there had been no mistaking Lily's eyes, so was there no mistaking that set of the jaw, that aggravating way the black hair stood up in the back...
From now on, it is war between us. I hate you, Harry James Potter, because you should have been mine.