You spend your nights avoiding sleep. You pour over textbooks and essays and novels, you walk and you pace and you run, you scribble and you sketch, you do anything and everything that crosses the hollow of your mind. Yet still you fall into uneasy slumber (and are you not vulnerable once again?).
She comes to you in the night, like an angel, a vision with flowing red hair. She is draped in greenest silk, and you see a future that could have been with the girl you could have had.
"Lily…"
She stays with you long into the morning, unspeaking. You tell her stories and she smiles at your tales with a beauty so fierce it makes your breath catch. You long to hear her voice. You ask her questions, but she sees right through you. You wonder if she is even looking at you, or if you are merely mirrored glass before her, in which she sees her own delighted face. She does naught but blink at you, beaming.
So you tell her things.
You tell her that you love her. You've always loved her. You will always love her. It's become a fact of your life, a staple of who you are.
"And I'm sorry. I miss you."
And then you stare into her eyes until you are long past coherency and you wonder if your whole miserable life up until now has been a dream, and you will wake any moment with this glorious woman by your side and tell her you love her again and how you've missed her and, oh,what a horrible dream you had.
You stand on shaky feet and walk towards her. She doesn't move, merely cocks her head to the side and questions you with her emerald eyes. So you kiss her. And she kisses you back.
You step back and you look at her with fresh eyes, lover's eyes. Suddenly, her face twists into a mocking mask of what you know it to be. It is cruel, tormenting, and she spits insults at you with all the fire of her soul.
"Coward! Traitor! Murderer!"
Her words are like swords but she grants you no mercy. These words do not stab, do not stop your heart from beating (racing) and there appears no end to her tirade.
Her words are sharp and dangerous, but they hack away at your skin, sliding under, slicing flesh and slitting veins until all you are is a mass of bloody muscle and twisted, ribboned skin, writhing and screaming, and there is her face, and she's melting, her hair receding into her skull and her eyes deepening, reddening, and her skin is waxy and she's like a human snake with the devil's voice and "AVADA KEDAVRA"she screams and-
And that is how you know it's a dream. You jolt awake with a jerk of your limbs and your pillow is wet with tears. You feel weak, useless, sick to your core and more tired than ever (but your lips still tingle with her kiss).
This is your greatest fear and you dread it every night. So you do your best to avoid sleep, lest she kill you in your dreams.
("Severus," he said once, "Why don't you take a Dreamless Sleep Potion? You look exhausted. I daresay you have been visited in the night?"
You bite your tongue.
"No. I deserve this. I deserve this."
He looks at you with the same pitying look that you will see when you kill him.
You'll count that as your third murder.)
(And you can't help but love her still.)