One rainy October afternoon you could find a man coming to see his one special person, every year on the same day. He was 27 and had been doing this same routine for seven years, he came, he talked, he cried, and then left; sounds simple well there's more to it then that. There were reasons for his visits, some that people don't understand and some that were so plain people can tell him without having to think about it.
He always came dressed in brightly coloured clothes and because it always rained on this day, he would have an equally bright cloak on, yet he always had a black umbrella. He'd sit in front of his one special person with a big grin on his face. He would put the cloak on the ground so he could sit on it and he would lean the umbrella against his shoulder so he wouldn't have to hold it. This is the part where he would talk usually for half an hour:
"Hey it's been a long time, well a year to be precise. I know your going to hate this and you expect it every time I come, but I've missed you very much. Well let's see what to tell, well something I'm sure you really don't want to know but Hermione is expecting her fourth child with Ron, yeah I know how many are they going to have? If their anything like Molly then it will have around seven or eight or even nine maybe. I wonder how many children we would have had, probably only the one we have right now. Though I would have asked for a second at one point anyway and being the person you are you wouldn't have argued, much! Oh yeah Albus has finally retired and given his role as head to Minerva. I wonder if you would have been head or deputy at least. I'm still the Defence Against the Dark Art's teacher, so the job wasn't as cursed as we had made it out to be!
"You know I told you about the awful teacher that had replaced you? Well thankfully they got rid of him. There's a much better one now, one I think would be kinda proud of, that's a funny thought though that you could be proud of anyone, this is the part in which you would say 'but I'm proud of you'. Are you really? I don't see what there is to be proud of, unless being still too scrawny, annoying and down right stupid in some things i.e. not being the one to kill Voldermort directly; if that's what you're proud of, then you need your head examined. There's so much I wanted to tell you but now that I'm here I actually can't remember half of it. So yeah I've told you half of what I wanted and now I don't know what to do.
"Should I just do my usual and reflect on the past and the time that we spent together; and then cry. You would call me a wuss and tell me to get over it though, wouldn't you? There are so many questions I wanted to ask you, so much I wanted to learn about from you and so many gaps of your past I wanted to fill. The only part of your life I know for certain is this part we had together. I always remember your smell the most, I found it the best remedy for stress to just come home and curl against you and take a long deep breath of that wonderful smell of yours. You'd probably say 'you've gone mad' and that 'any smell of mine must be horrible'. But you know your wrong right? I remember you hair as well, when you'd just washed it and let it to dry, it would feel almost like silk, no actually I would have sworn it was silk. If only your students knew you they way I did, they would know just how silly they were to call you all those names. Could you imagine the look on their faces if they knew just how good you smelt and how wonderful you hair really was?
"When people talk about you now, these things aren't mentioned, well of course because they don't know these things. I've told them you know, I had even added into the leaving speech I gave; well ok I had seen the look on their faces then, it was comical. But not quite as comical as when I had told them of how you would have also been a great father to your child and a great husband to me…"
"Daddy, daddy,"
Same as always, here is his son running down the path to hug his father tight around the middle. While a figure walks slower behind, though when he reaches the father and son the same question is always asked by the father:
"Has it already been half an hour?"
And the same reply:
"No but Tom here didn't want to wait any longer."
"Sorry daddy."
"That's quite alright Tom, now come here and sit on my knee and say hi to dad."
"Hi dad."
"That's it, now is there anything you want to say before we go and have a cup of hot chocolate; that's was dads favourite you know?"
"I know daddy and dad I miss you and so does daddy and why did you go, daddy gets so upset on this day. I kept hearing you weren't a very nice man, but I always tell them that if you weren't a very nice man why did you save daddy the way you did? I always say 'I love him and nothing you say can change my mind on that.'"
Same routine every year, though the son always has something different to say, and that's usually what starts his father crying if he wasn't before. Even the ending is the same; it always ends with one last sentence from the father:
"I love you Severus Snape and nothing that happens will change that."
At the end of the afternoon you could find Remus Lupin walking a little ahead of Harry Potter carrying his son Tom, through the graveyard that had become familiar to all of them over the past seven years. As they would reach the exit Harry would turn around a wave frankly while shouting:
"Good bye, see you next year."
Some one could see this as upsetting if not for the fact that a big grin had spread across his tear stained face, the grin Severus Snape had said he had fallen in love with.