Her Eyes
by ThatRomantic
Severus drew his last breaths staring into the eyes he had fallen in love with and surrounded by the features of the man he lost it all to. He was proud of the way he was dying because it meant that he was saving a part of her. He had hated Harry Potter from the moment he had set eyes on him. He was not sure whether it was because he looked so much like his father, or that he had his mother's eyes. The eyes that used to bore into his and try and read him like she did her books, the eyes that used to dance with happiness when she was laughing, the eyes that bore so much fire and hatred for him in the last two and a half years of school.
He did not know whether he would have liked it more if Potter had looked more like Lily, or if it would have been even more unbearable to be constantly reminded that her beautiful existence was extinguished by someone he had once bowed to and called master. He did know that there were reasons he wanted to hate Potter, Granger, and Weasley, reasons that in the past had felt perfectly valid. There were more reasons to hate Potter than there was to hate his father. Harry looked so like his father that it was painful to see the wide, emerald green eyes staring up at him from the face he loathed all those years ago. His naivety of the magical world was something that reminded Severus of sitting under the shade with Lily, telling her all he could about the new world she was a part of. The boy destroyed the naivety with his recklessness that instantly reminded him of the idiot she married.
He blamed the boy for his mother's murder more times than he could remember, but he blamed himself more. He should have done more to protect her, he should have told her things while he had the chance – but he did not and had not, and it would not have made a difference. He swore to protect the only part of her that she cared about as best he could, even if it meant that he had to stare into her eyes everyday with hatred, and see the hatred aimed back at him in a passion he had not seen before.
He watched as her son made friends with other people that reminded him of her, and that made him want to hate the boy more, and in turn hate the others that had reminded him of her. The Weasley boy's hair was the same shade Lily's had been. He would always remember the way it would sparkle in the sunlight and have more golden tones when the rays hit it. He would never forget the way it moved with her emotions and flowed so beautifully around her face. The obscene amount of freckles on Weasley's face was nothing like Lily's modest speckles across her nose and cheeks, but his pale complexion was similar to that of her milky cream skin. The skin that Severus always wondered if it were as silky as it seemed.
Then Harry had made friends with Granger. She had been almost as hard to bear as the Potter boy, as she was like Lily in ways the boy was not. For a start, she was Muggleborn, but there were many Muggleborns that came in and out of the school in the years he had been teaching at Hogwarts. Granger was like Lily in more ways than that. She knew Hogwarts: A History off by heart and back-to-front before even stepping foot in the school, and was always keen to learn more about the Wizarding world. Severus had loved that about Lily when they were young, he loved that it was he she would ask about the things she did not understand or wanted to know about. He loved that she had read every book they were required to get during the summer, and that she would want to discuss every inch of every page that she had read.
Granger was also unfailingly kind to every creature she met, and tried her hardest not to judge in the same way she was judged. When he had heard Granger shouting at Black to treat his house-elf better and not as a slave, Severus was taken back to Lily arguing with anyone who was cruel to Lupin while loyally keeping the werewolf's secret, even when Severus had been insistent in trying to find out what it was. She warned him against making things that were best left lie his business.
Severus had hated the three teens with such determination, that he often forgot what they represented – loyalty, bravery, and unfailing friendship. The three things that would help to bring down the man who had killed the only woman he had ever loved. The only woman he had entertained dreams of a future life with. The only woman he would never have. He had resigned himself to that twenty two years previously, when he had called her that unforgivable word.
Images of a red-headed, green eyed girl, smiling and laughing flashed before his eye, pictures of cold, wet, windy nights, of a man with a silver beard and twinkling eyes passed behind his eyelids and in the last act to help her son, he shakily put his wand to his forehead and drew out a string of silver. Once the memories were carefully taken from the tip of his wand, everything was black – but for two almond shaped, emerald green eyes.
