Author's Notes: This odd little oneshot popped into my head after reading several Lily / Severus stories. I always wondered, even if Lily and he parted ways before they graduated Hogwarts, could such a long-lasting friendship die so suddenly? Did they ever meet in later life before their respective worlds fell apart? What would that be like?
I did adequate research through the books to fit this into proper canon but if I have missed something, do let me know and feedback is always welcome!
Disclaimer: Harry Potter, characters and settings, naturally, do not belong to me but JK Rowling.
The Only One She Ever Feared
Winter, 1980
"I won't be gone at all long."
"But it's Christmas Eve."
"I'll be home all day tomorrow, James, I promise. I'll be back in time to get dinner started."
"Why can't you just tell me where you're going at least?"
"Love you, sweetheart. See you later."
Lily Potter, once known as Lily Evans, shut her front door behind her and walked several hundred yards down the block until she came to the cemetery which was largely empty on such a holiday. Mourners were seldom and far between thankfully—even with all the horrible events in the news: the mystifying disappearance of Caradoc Dearborn and, most recently, the brutal slayings of Fabian and Gideon Prewett, Molly Weasley's brothers. Unconsciously, her footsteps quickened as she slipped behind the snowy crematorium and vanished with a faint pop!
Her hard soles clacked on the uneven stones as she reappeared some distance from the cottage in Godric's Hollow. The stench of the river was strong in her nostrils, a mingling of rancid fish and wet vegetation. She had not been down this way for a long time. With the newly fallen snow browning in the gutter the rural community with its overshadowing mill looked even more dilapidated and rundown than usual. It wasn't the greatest of neighborhoods. James would have disapproved. The thought of her husband gave her a nasty guilty twinge though she tamped it down firmly. She hadn't come down for here for any reason like that! No, the reason she'd come down here, to Spinner's End, was somewhat more suited to the holiday: nostalgic and bittersweet.
The only other person on the street was coming from the opposite direction. A woman in rags, she weaved unsteadily half-on the footpath half-off, singing under her breath, "Charity, charity, a quid for Christmas."
She was much taller closer up and Lily felt an uncomfortable pricking up her spine. For reassurance, she reached for the wand stashed in her pocket under her long coat. Her fingers closed around it just as the woman reached her.
She had heavily-hooded lids and a gleaming smile quite in contrast with her beggar garb. Her teeth bared almost in Lily's face. "A quid, pretty angel?" Her long, clawlike nails came up like a penitent's.
"Sorry," Lily sidestepped nervously. "I don't have anything on me."
The woman pouted and turned her profile but continued on walking, whispering almost threateningly under her breath. "Easy to see why he would want you spared."
"Excuse me?"
"Soon, soon, pretty one."
Lily whirled round but the woman had vanished. Unnerved, she hurried down the now-deserted and darkening street.
At last she located the house—only because it was the oldest and shabbiest at the end of an old and shabby cul-de-sac. The porch looked half fallen in and the steps creaked as though about to give way under her heels when she climbed the four up to the weathered door. Something tingled along her skin and she thought she detected magical wards brushing over her; it set the hairs on the back of her neck and arms on end under her thick manteau and the red scarf wadded beneath her chin.
Licking wind-chafed lips, she shook red hair off her cheeks and eyelids which were wet with snow and knocked, the sound of her knuckles on wood barely louder than a dry twig snapping under a deep drift. She tried again. Her fist thudded on the wood a little louder this time in an effort to express the strength she didn't feel. Nothing. A curious mingling of disappointment and relief filled her to the brim as she slumped back against the railing which squawked ominously. She waited a minute longer than turned around. She shouldn't have come here…it had been a useless, foolish, stupid hope, how could she think he'd even still be here after all these years?
Behind her, a chain clattered, a bolt snapped back though the tingle on her skin remained. A thin rectangle of light pierced the snow-scattered porch and illuminated her salt-crusted boots.
"What, no tiny babe in swaddling clothes to give this meaningless holiday it's proper cast?"
"Did anyone ever tell you you're such a grouch?" she replied just as sweetly without turning around.
"No one ever seems to tell me anything else."
She faced him. The familiar, biting and utterly humorless brand of wit he had so often employed when they were children washed over her like capsaicin as she laid eyes on him. What she saw surprised her and at the same time sent a tight pang through her chest. He looked older certainly though in years he was not much more than she. But he looked it whereas she was virtually untouched by age—or so James told her.
Without a trace of the tentativeness earlier, she trotted back up the steps and glanced pointedly past him first then up into his sallow face. "May I come in?"
"You'll find little room at this inn." He seemed mildly embarrassed as he stood aside to let her cross the threshold, his movements stiff and jerky as if the prospect of visitors on Christmas Eve startled and even somewhat disoriented him. Which, she reflected on hindsight, it probably did.
"I don't spend much time here," he offered with a furtive, disgusted look around the sitting room he led her into.
The place did have an air of neglect about it. There were no signs of the season at all: no decorative baubles in the corners or above doorways, nothing hanging in the window, no trite Christmas tree before the fire grate. The bookshelves alone had been dusted and the table cleanly wiped with two glasses of wine lay out beside a carmine bottle.
"Were you expecting me?" she wondered and only realized she'd spoken aloud when his lips quirked in an indecipherable expression. She couldn't read him like she used to anymore.
"No. I must say this is a…surprise. Your husband would disapprove of you being here."
The remark was meant to distract from his evasion and she knew it but it still stung. Lily's lips pursed and her green eyes flared in the dim light while she wrestled with her sopping shoes which were dripping onto the dingy carpet. "Since when does what James thinks matter to you?"
His long fingers twitched in an insouciant shrug as he disposed of one of the glasses with a flick of the wand lying on the scuffed table. The golden band circling her third finger scorched as his fathomless eyes settled on it. "It doesn't."
"You don't look well, Sev."
That drew him away and he flashed a quick glance at her face. "So I have been told."
"Are you spending this…'meaningless holiday' as you so put it, by yourself?" she knew he heard pity despite her careful inflection and resented it.
"My father has been dead for six years, my mother longer. I have no other family and no one else I would wish to spend it with."
Lily relented. Those bitter, personal bridges were ones she no longer had the privilege of crossing. A large 'keep out' sign had been pinned all over his face; new furrows creased his mouth and forehead that had not been there the last time she had seen him. Despite what she knew of him, it saddened her.
She curled up on the battered couch, cotton stuffing leaking through the seams as she tucked her chilled feet under her and accepted a proffered glass of wine. It was almost too easy to fall back into the old pattern of familiar companionship they had enjoyed before she remembered why she had come.
Severus Snape remained edgily standing and plucked his own goblet from the small circular table. He watched her over the rim of his glass with those inscrutable eyes then set it down with a slight clink untouched. "If you came to sit in silence and stare, I can think of better uses for your time."
She flushed. Even James had never been able to get her to blush the way Severus could with a word or glance accompanying a mingled feeling of chagrin and shame. It wiped away the last of her timidity. "We're going into hiding, James and I. They're looking for us, I know they are," she stared at her fingers plucking at her wool jacket, wondering what effect those words would produce but unable to look up to see for herself.
James, Sirius, Remus, Albus had all warned her, cautioned her and manipulated her into concealing this one secret from everyone: family and friends. Even Tuney didn't know where they would be. But even if she did tell him, she reasoned, he wouldn't be able to find her anyway unless told by their Secret-Keeper. Maybe that was why she had walked through the ankle-deep snow to this tiny Muggle corner of nowhere, why she had come to his doorstep tonight of all nights.
It was their last chance for reconciliation.
He was silent for so long, she darted a glance at his face, worried he'd turned to stone. His face was just as rigid and hollow but his fingers squeezed the arms of the chair as though trying to throttle it.
It was suddenly too uncomfortable for her. She didn't want to hear what he would say: either the callous dismissal that would forever break any ties she had to him or he to her or a plea for her to stay which would wound even more deeply. She couldn't handle either one. An electric shock ran through her legs and she fumbled for her shoes.
"I have to go. I'm sorry. I have to get dinner on the table."
With a swish of dark robes he was up and blocking her retreat. While he was thin and undernourished as she remembered, he was strong. His arms caged her against a bookshelf. The black void behind his eyes sucked her in and held her fast.
"No. You wanted this conversation, you wanted something from me. We have not spoken in five years and you turn up now? Why?"
"I told you why…" She breathed, trapped between her uncertainty and his. She knew full well the reason she'd given was not the one he wanted to hear. He wanted her to say exactly why she had come here, through the snow and danger, against her husband's concerned wishes to attempt to renew their long-cold friendship.
"Are you afraid of me, Lily Potter?" His arms were trembling. "Or do you fear something else? What would your precious husband say if he saw you here? You didn't tell him. You didn't tell him you were coming here," he spat viciously with the full force of his bitterness behind it. It scored her so deeply she flinched.
"Look at me."
"No! I hate it when you do that."
"Do what?"
Her chin came up as new strength firmed her. He was still far too close but she didn't dare touch him and the thought of reaching her wand stowed in her robes had passed fleetingly and immediately from her mind. "Stop blaming James! They were your choices, Severus, that broke our friendship. Yours. What's happened to you?"
In his agitation his black sleeves had ridden up a little along his forearm and she caught the barest glimpse of something dark and twisted that shone lurid against the pale skin.
"You…" The word froze in her throat, breathless and far more fearful than she'd meant to sound but she suddenly didn't know the man in front of her. "You, you did it then. You actually did it."
As if her gaze had burned him in turn, his arms snatched away from the wall and the fingers of his right hand convulsively covered his left forearm. His lips tightened as they always did when he was defiant or flinging his walls up again. "Yes."
"The Dearborns…the Prewetts…" the names hung like a death sentence on her lips.
He made no move either to deny or claim the half-accusation.
She pushed off the wall with the excruciating, straightening spine of a much older woman and her green eyes appeared dull grey. Silence screamed in the heaviness of the room as neither seemed to want to look at the other. She backed towards the front door. He didn't restrain her. All power of movement and speech seemed to have left him. She stumbled as the cold metal of the doorknob jarred against her lower back. In an instant it was under her palm.
"I am sorry, Sev, really I am."
He stirred at the old nickname but the esurient flame that had flickered to life behind his eyes when he had first seen her on his doorstep had gone out. "No, you're not. You only wish you were."
Lily was out, down the steps and three blocks away before she finally slowed and let the tears long restrained stream hotly down her cheeks. They froze instantly into an uneven glaze. Turning over her shoulder, she forced herself to look back but by the time she did so the tiny house at the end of the row had been swallowed up by the night and the falling snow.