Characters: Severus, Lily
Summary: Between heartbeats, he loves her.
Pairings: onesided Severus x Lily
Author's Note: I'm not entirely sure about my characterization of Snape, even if he is a little kid who, at this point, hasn't really become jaded yet. Advice, anyone?
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
Between heartbeats, he loves her. He's just a child, an eleven-year-old boy who has had so little occasion to experience love that he shouldn't know what it is, but like all children he's also equipped with a basic instinct for knowing love when he sees it—or feels it.
And truth be told, Severus Snape has never been more sure about anything in his short life.
Even now, though, Lily Evans is—totally, irrevocably—out of reach. It's what Severus knows, what he's dismayed to discover, what he tries to ignore even though he knows it's the truth. When Severus tries to tell himself that maybe, some day she'll love him, all he gets for an answer is the hollow echo of his own voice within his heart and the surety that life has always left him with—that he's hopeless, without a chance, and completely, utterly, out of her league.
He'll try anyway, though.
Light spills in uneven patches on the floor of his room, from the grimy window that's never cleaned. This is what Severus wakes up to, every morning, the light, not an alarm clock (there's no such thing in this house; his father hates alarm clocks, and loud, sudden noises have riled him since his discovery that his wife is a witch).
And it's those moments, the moments lying awake in bed only capable of listening to his heart beat before his mother comes in to wake him up, that convinces Severus to keep trying, even if it's hopeless.
Because Lily reminds him of the bits of light that splash the room in the morning, and even hopeless things have heartbeats for him to breathe on.