A/N: I have long associated "The Impossible Dream (The Quest)" from "Man of La Mancha" with Severus' story, and was thrilled to claim a prompt in a recent fest asking for Severus/Lily inspired by the lyrics to the song. I've included the lyrics at the end of the story. (And I admit to having used these lyrics before!)
Panic, pain and green eyes like Lily's, yet not Lily at all. Eyes that hold him, then fade away, points of light growing more distant, more faint, and he's falling, falling….
He wakes to find himself rocking slowly on a swing in a Muggle playground, familiar yet foreign, a grown man in soft, clean Wizarding robes that fit him well. Feet skimming the ground, breeze through his hair, sun on his face. No castle. No chaos. No Dark Lord. No snake.
No Potter.
Alone.
The world is eerily silent, save, after a time that might have been minutes, or hours, or days, the slow creak of chains to his right.
"A playground, Severus?"
He turns his head slowly, and Albus is there, sitting on a swing, holding the chains in hands wrinkled with age yet whole, uncursed. There is a softness about him, about his face, his robes, even his beard, a softness that is new, and foreign, and somehow comforting.
Severus cautiously lifts a hand to his own neck, remembering the fatal bite. There is no wound, and no blood. He tilts his head back to see puffy clouds in a peaceful, azure sky. The stretch of muscle and skin and sinew is pleasant. Is real.
Nothing hurts. He has not felt this way in days, weeks, months. Years.
A lifetime.
"Severus, it is done."
He turns his head again, and Albus Dumbledore is looking at him, blue eyes bright behind half-moon glasses.
It is done.
He remembers.
"He is dead, then?"
Severus does not look at Albus as he speaks. He watches the clouds again, and thinks instead of Lily. There is something missing inside him - the old rancor, the bitterness. The skeletal hand clutching his heart, restricting it.
Beside him, Albus laughs.
"Tom is dead, Severus. But Harry - Harry lives."
He takes this news more calmly than he should. He thinks about it as he swings gently, pushing off the ground now and again and wondering why his feet are bare. Why Harry Potter is alive when Albus said he must die.
"In the end, Severus, he understood. Because you made him see - you gifted him your memories."
"I confess I didn't think it possible," Severus says after a quiet moment has passed. He chances a look at the old headmaster. "That Potter could - would - kill him."
"He used an Expelliarmus," Albus says. He says it with a certain pride, a sage satisfaction.
Harry Potter did not dispel the Dark Lord with an Unforgivable.
Severus wants to hate him for it. Hate Potter for his purity of heart. Hate Albus for his pride in the boy.
"You never hated the boy, Severus."
Hadn't he?
"Remember why you did it, Severus. Why you came to me that night."
"I could never forget that, Albus." He looks ahead, out toward the grassy field that stretches out before him, and somewhere between the grass and the blue sky above, he sees her shadow.
Lily Evans. His heavenly cause.
"It was you, Severus. You. Your quest is over. You brought him down as surely as Harry did. Think of it - what your sacrifice has done for the Wizarding world."
He turns his head and stares at Albus. He knows, in the soul he swore he did not have, that they are on equal footing now. That Albus, great wizard, headmaster, member of the Wizengamot, defeater of Grindelwald, is no more man than he here in this time and place in between.
"I care nothing for the Wizarding world," he says, eyes turned back to the horizon. There is no malice in his voice. It is a quiet statement of fact.
A hand - a corporal hand he can feel against flesh and sinew - squeezes his shoulder then falls away.
"Ah - yes. You stayed true to her, all these years. Even when her son came to Hogwarts, looking so much like James."
In any other world, Albus would be baiting him. But here, now, in this place without measure, it is a statement of fact.
And Severus remembers his first glimpse of the boy. Messy hair, glasses, the Sorting hat shouting out Gryffindor in a parody of the day of his own sorting. The boy hurrying over to his new house table. The moment when he'd looked up at him, had caught his eyes.
An arrow through his heart. A mockery of all that was pure, and good, and holy.
And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest, that my heart will lie peaceful and calm, when I'm laid to my rest.
Yet he bore it. For seven more years, he bore it. Bore it with the unbearable sorrow of one who has lost everything, and is condemned to live with the daily reminder of the man who took it all away.
"He was a rule breaker, Albus. He was careless, reckless. A mediocre student at best. You coddled him."
The words are rote, rehearsed. Where was the rancor of old?
Albus laughs.
"I coddled him, Severus? Coddled the boy? Really? I realize you were blinded by the unruly hair and Gryffindor friends, but you know, Severus, you know in your heart of hearts that the boy was not anything like his father."
He speaks the last part very quietly, looking intently at Severus, even though Severus' eyes are still on the horizon, on the shadow of movement almost too distant to see. He does not want to admit to Albus that he is right. That Harry Potter was brave. And true. That in his heart, the boy held fast to a faith in Albus Dumbledore, to a conviction that the world was worth saving, and to a love gifted to him many years before, in his mother's arms, as her life bled out before him.
"Do you know what it cost me to go back to him?" Severus asks, breaking the silence a few minutes later. "After the third task? To deliberately march back there - into that hell?"
"I think I know."
But the voice is different now. Not Albus. Not Albus at all.
A hand, soft as he remembers it, strong as a mother's love, folds over his on the chain.
"I stood before him once, too, Severus."
To love, pure and chaste from afar.
Not so far now.
Lily's voice is just as he remembered it. No older, no sadder, no more or less heartfelt.
"Do you remember how we used to swing, Severus?" His eyes are still cast downward, and he sees her bare feet kick against the ground, feels the swing set shift and settle with her movement. "We thought we could reach the stars."
He blinks. He remembers.
He raises his eyes.
"He took you from me."
She shakes her head, understanding.
"It was not Harry's doing, Severus. It was my choice. Mine." She is sailing now, her body carving out great arcs as she swings forward and back. She whispers the last word, holding it as she flies.
"I hated him."
She sighs, skimming her feet on the dirt below them to slow down.
"You didn't hate him, Severus." She is swaying gently now in the swing beside him, side to side, bumping lightly against him. She lowers her voice until she is barely whispering, but it echoes in the ethereal emptiness around them. "You hated yourself."
"I wanted to hate him," he says, weakly, and her hand comes down upon his again, still on the cold chain of the swing, and she squeezes it gently.
"He understands now, Severus."
The hand falls away from his, and when he looks up again, she is there - right there before him, looking at him with those eyes he remembers, those eyes he can never forget.
Look at me.
"Severus - look at me."
He'd loved her from afar for so long, through time and space, past death itself. Looking at her now, staring into the depths of those eyes, is painful in a way he'd never imagined it could be. He believes himself too damaged, too brittle, too stained by hate to deserve even her pity.
"Life is what you make of it, Severus Snape," she says. "And the same goes, my friend, for what comes after."
He stares at her, and the desire is there within him to scoff, to misinterpret what she is saying. To turn his lips up in a Slytherin sneer, to approach the beginning of this, his next great adventure, as he approached the life that came before - with disillusion, with resentment, with rancor and fear and self-hatred.
It would be easier. Require less trust. Require less hope.
"Don't," she whispers, dropping to her knees before him and taking his hands in her own. She lifts them, and kisses his clasped fingers. Her lips are warm on his flesh, and her voice, when she speaks, is a whisper in the wind.
"Don't remember who you were, Severus. Imagine who you iwant/i to be."
What you want to be.
"What you did, Severus. Never doubt what you did, or why you did it." She is looking at him earnestly. "In the end, you played a bigger part in Harry's life than James did, even than I did."
He does not deny it.
"He'll remember you all his life. Vividly, Severus. Myself - James - we're shadows to him, ghosts of what might have been, what he might have had. But you, my friend, are real."
Severus does not reply. Had he been at Hogwarts, standing before Albus, he would have scoffed. He would have reminded Albus that he hated the boy, that he treated him with the cold bitterness he deserved. That it was work enough to keep the child alive with all that Albus seemed to do to hasten his end.
"I've never forgotten," Lily repeats gently. "And he'll always remember."
He touches her cheek, disbelieving, and she looks him in the eye.
The playground dissolves around them, and he finds himself on a train platform. Children and parents push past him and through him. The Hogwarts Express stands at the ready. The platform is crowded and noisy, but his eyes are drawn to a man crouching down beside a boy. They are just here, at his feet, and all other voices are drowned out as the man speaks to the boy, to his son, reassuring him.
"Albus Severus, you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew."
Severus watches the tableau play out. The hug, the bustle to board the train, the child - Albus Severus - hanging out the window waving goodbye. The train pulling out with great puffs of steam, Harry Potter standing there, waving, until the train is no more than a speck in the distance.
"Foolish boy," Severus says. "Foolish, foolish boy."
But the corner of his mouth turns upward into what he remembers as a smile. The man he knew as Harry Potter puts his arm around his wife and takes a child by the hand, a girl with red hair and brown eyes, a girl who dances around her father's legs with all the joy of carefree childhood.
A girl who hands him a crumpled daisy. Who brings the flower back to life with her sweet, warm breath.
"It will be your turn soon," Potter says, looking back one last time toward the long-gone train.
And the world will be better for this.
And the platform fades away, and Severus is on the playground, a boy, seven years old, watching a clever red-headed girl sail high on a swing, calling out to her sour-faced sister across the way, and for a moment he has an odd feeling of deja-vu, but it is gone in a trice, and he steps forward out of the shadows into an old world made new, and climbs onto the swing beside her, and sets his life in motion.
Fin
The Quest/The Impossible Dream
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest to follow that star
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far
To fight for the right without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause
And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star