Notes: I am an official Snape/Lily shipper now. I love them. They're amazing. So I felt the memory that Harry saw in the Pensieve was a little lacking. I decided to write it on my own. It might be missing some key facts that were in the books, but the general ideas are the same, I think.
Just because you were hurt doesn't mean you shouldn't bleed.
As Severus Snape ransacked Grimmauld Place, thoughts of Lily Evans flashed through his mind. He had never been able to think of her as Lily Potter. That meant giving her up, leaving her. He couldn't do it. But she had been friends with Sirius. Maybe there was something here...
He made his way up to Sirius's bedroom. It was full of pictures and Gryffindor banners. Severus sneered at them. There were Muggle girls in bikinis, pictures of motorcycles and a photograph of the Marauders. Severus ripped his way through motorcycle maintenance guides and barely opened spell books. He searched through the draws of the desk and as he did so, he stopped short.
There, at the very top of a stack of parchment, was a picture of the Potter family. There was little Harry Potter, the boy that Severus had never really despised as much as he let on, riding a toy broomstick and laughing. There was James Potter's legs chasing after his tiny son. And there. There was Lily Evans, laughing at her boys. Severus lifted the picture out of the draw.
Underneath the picture was a letter. Severus would recognize the handwriting anywhere. Lifting this out of the draw as well, he read it. At the end, Lily had signed it with 'lots of love.' Tears streamed down his face, down his hooked nose, but he made no move to wipe them away.
Lily had always meant everything to him, since the day he had first spotted her using magic. He had loved her since he met her. They had been best friends and, at the time, he thought they would be together forever. But they weren't. It was his fault. He had fallen in with the Death Eaters. He had called her a Mudblood. He was a coward.
He hadn't meant to, but he had caused her death. He had heard the prophecy, he had delivered the information to the Dark Lord without fully understanding what it meant or the fact that he may have heard it wrong. He was the reason she was gone.
The guilt he had felt had eaten at him for years. He was so ashamed. He tried to rectify his actions by switching sides. He had tried to protect her. But Peter Pettigrew had ruined it.
Severus's hatred for Pettigrew ran so deep that he thought he would burst with it whenever they were in the room together. However, he had learned to control it. He had to.
Severus cried for a long time. He hadn't known he was so sad, so depressed, but he was. He felt so guilty. He hadn't remembered for a long time. He had thought he could handle not having her. He had hoped that helping her son would have been enough to make him feel a little less guilty, but it hadn't. The guilt overtook his body, spilling out his tears, causing his heart to beat much too quickly and his breaths to come up much too short.
Carefully, he tucked the second sheet of parchment, the one signed 'lots of love,' into his traveling cloak. Then, he carefully ripped apart the picture, keeping the smiling Lily for himself and crumpling Harry and James beneath the wardrobe. He would keep her, her laughter and her love, with him always.
End.