A/N: An SS/HG tragic oneshot.
The moment at which a child becomes an adult is always very ambiguous. How does a playful, if not somewhat promiscuous, girl become a mother? What changes within the course of a few years to make a boy a man, a man a king? How does one even begin to describe a love affair which was never meant to be, between a man and the woman he once knew to be a mere girl?
To start, love affairs between children are hard enough to depict, by nature. Somehow, two years after graduation, that spitfire of a girl gave birth to the Boy Who Lived. The brilliant smile lightly blowing away those wisps of January embers, pouting of the arrogance of her someday husband–that was the smile that haunted him to no end. It was the smile for which he could die happily in an instant if it were to grace him just once more. He had barely been a man and not all seven seas of the earth could have washed away the blood from his palms. And she had barely been a woman.
But that was then. That was when a love could still be conceivable, when he was still vulnerable to its passions. That was when he did not flinch at an embrace... but merely remained still. He was a cold man on impression, and colder upon first-hand knowledge. The years that turned him into a man had hardened his sense of compassion. What had to be done would be done; there was nothing he could do to stop it, and thus, it was better to be detached from death than to mourn it. Surely he wasn't afraid of death.
...But that was then. That was before he recognized the woman she had become. The girl who once fussed over the grades she received from him, the girl who once picked fights with those Slytherin princes, the girl who once threw a fit over some petty newspaper article, was now, somehow, his equal. And she cared. No matter how often he blocked her out, she managed to wheedle her way into his thoughts. And she always asked. He had not experienced such a feat since he'd known that fiery personality with hair to match it. So he was afraid of death–just not of his own.
It was always so immoral. Not so long ago, she'd been a girl, after all. And where to draw that hazy line separating her maturity levels? She certainly reeked of innocence. But he had been quick to judge, and quicker to regret doing so. Women. There was always more than what met the eye.
Molly had been his first kick in the teeth. Her words repeated through his brain. "Severus, can't you see it? She's falling in love with you, and you're too proud a man to act upon your own emotions. And don't say you've lost them, don't you dare..." He shivered at the thought of it. The tone of her anger. She loved that girl more than anything, possibly even her own lost daughter. He remembered that his face remained expressionless even upon witnessing the tears of a woman older than himself. He should have comforted her, he should have told her that he was only doing it to protect her, that it was logical and would only be a few weeks... But what was he to do? He should have, but he could never have. He watched her weep, still as stone, until her tear-ducts were dry, and stayed in the room past her fretful exit.
A few weeks turned into a few months, and then a whole year passed and they'd still not won the war. The death toll on both sides grew heavier by the moment and by then he, Arthur and Remus had made a decision. They would stage an ambush; a final battle. They would risk everything to gain everything. Most objected to their pawning of the Potter boy (especially her), but he dutifully obliged as though he were fulfilling some responsibility owed to the deaths of his father, his mother (oh, Lily), his mentors, his friends, and his lover. Indeed, such a young man had lost so much, and, thus, he was brazen and ruthless, quite ready to end it all to rid himself of the weights he carried on his shoulders and the burden of loneliness to which he was so unaccustomed. And yet, he did not succeed, and succeeded all the same. He could not rinse his mind of his murders, and yet he performed the most essential murder of all. The Boy Who Lived, so to speak, lived. But whether he lived internally was still questionable.
His closest friends were not so lucky. But of course. He'd tried to save her but the love was too bloody strong. Women. To think that one who had been a girl in such a short time previous to that had displayed such valiant efforts as to save her two closest friends, as well as the man who had been dead ever since that July night of '81. Did she not realise she could have revived him? Was she unaware? Or was she so positively selfish that she could not grant him his one wish at the expense of her own misery? She was a girl; she could have healed. She certainly had enough time. But then again, he'd had the same time, and he wasted it away...
No, she was different. And yet, she lived humbly and died nobly for an incredible cause. Poetic justice, of course, would have it that love should spite him just as soon as he'd attempt to open his mind to it for the first time in nearly twenty years. And that killed him. Again.