Note: Unrequited Snape/Lily, some Snape/OC.
I really love them together and I was thinking about it. Men do have needs. This is a theory on how Snape fulfilled his own without betraying Lily.
Xxx
Lost
A One-Shot
Whenever a red-haired girl with green eyes crossed his path, Severus Snape cursed her, himself, James Potter and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. It had always been Lily, ever since childhood. Lily Evans (never would she be Lily Potter to him. Never.) had been the love of his miserable life.
Snape was man after all and men have needs. His needs were fulfilled with a variety of women. At first he tried women who looked nothing like Lily. Blondes, brunettes but never a woman with black hair and he also avoided hazel eyes.
But then, he realized that they would not do. While he did gain satisfaction from these encounters, they did not fulfill any emotional needs. He needed to feel more, the way he had felt when he was with Lily.
So began his search for red-haired, green-eyed women.
There were few who would go to him willingly. He did not enjoy the idea of a whore, but he had to go to one if he wanted 'Lily'. There was one, a Muggle whore, who fed into his delusion in a way that put witches to shame. She sounded like Lily, and would let him call her by the dead woman's name. For five years, he went to this woman monthly during the school year, and weekly in the summer.
The woman was killed on Halloween, eight years to the day of Lily's death. She was struck by a car. One of her fellow street walkers told him when he came for a visit. In his own way, he mourned the woman.
He never learned her name. He wondered what it was, who she was.
To him, she was simply the second Lily.
Of course, his downfall came, yet again, three years before Harry came to school and his purpose changed. The woman in question was not a woman at all, but rather, a student. She was a Gryffindor with red hair and green eyes. He had spent years ignoring her, and for a while, it had worked. The girl, Naomi, had become another face in the crowd of students. An unremarkable girl until she turned 17 and came to him for help with her class work.
Her eyes, hair, body.
All Lily.
She had been willing and of the legal age. Nothing else mattered. She looked like the woman he had lost, but frozen at the age where he had lost her. It was like he was getting a second chance with the girl. So Snape had gotten involved with her, the girl who wasn't sure of what was really going on, but was willing to be kissed and touched by her professor.
It was a miracle that no one found out. They went for six months, meeting secretly in his office. She did improve, but that was on her own. Snape did not play favorites. And she knew it.
It had ended near the end of the year, when he had slipped and called her 'Lily' rather than by her own name. She had asked who she was and he told her. Even showed her a picture. She called him sick and told him that it was over, that she refused to compete with a dead woman.
Snape had felt guilty for years. She had been his student. A child really. He had manipulated her into falling for him, using her because of her looks.
The girl, Naomi, ended up moving to the States and last he heard, married man named Kevin Lynch. He had seen the announcement in the paper. The man was tall with long dark hair.
He felt as if he had ruined her the way Lily had ruined him.
As far as he knew, she never told anyone. He certainly never did. Who was there to tell?
And so, he spent the remaining decade of his life mourning Lily as he should have all along.
Even in the end she had been on his mind.
Look at me.