what branches grow, part 1/13 of the wasteland.
Summary: because that word, as hurled from the mouth of her best friend, is her final straw.
Rating: T
Pairing(s): unrequited Severus/Lily, unrequited James/Lily
"Mama, life had just begun, but now I've gone and thrown it all away." - Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody
1971
It was one thing, when they were children, fashioning incantations from nonsense and wands from particularly enticing looking twigs.
"We'll be the greatest magicians of all time!" Lily declares, standing atop a grassy hill with Severus leaning over her shoulder.
"Er… Lily."
"Yes?"
"We're not called magicians. Those're the idiots who pull stuff out of hats. We, we're wizards." A pause. "Or witches."
Slightly crestfallen, she wrinkles her nose for a second and smiles again in earnest.
"Then we'll be the greatest witches and wizards of all time."
They sit across each other, underneath the protective green of surrounding trees, discussing magic, Hogwarts, the entire Wizarding world and what it contains. He's just finished explaining how she'll get her letter inviting her to attend the school, when she asks him a question, surprisingly shy.
"Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?"
Snape looks down at the grass and his handful of shredded oak leaves for a second, giving his answer quite a bit of thought.
"No," he says, finally. "It doesn't make any difference."
She relaxes and smiles up at him, so happy that the petals in her daisy wreath begin to dance. He glances elsewhere, his excitement warring with a newfound sense of guilt. He'll explain it eventually, he tells himself. It doesn't make any difference to him, and therefore it will make no difference to anyone else, because he won't allow it to be so.
1976
Lily Evans revises long after everyone else has gone to sleep, the candle at her bedside slowly burning itself down to a stub, her hair flickering the same color as her bed hangings in the low light. In the morning, Lily only stops studying long enough to shower, tie a fuchsia ribbon into her hair, eat and read the Prophet. She pages carefully through the newspaper each morning, noting the usual litany of deaths, disappearances, strange rumors gathering like shadows, with creeping dread. These faces flanked by obituaries, some are Half-bloods but most are Muggle-borns. The Muggles don't even get a line of text.
She throws herself into lessons, her notes particularly cramped and feverish. More often as of late, she's heard it said that those who grew up without Wizarding parents are inferior at certain types of magic, and she will prove it wrong with parchment and ink, in wandwork and incantation, with ten Outstandings to her name if that is what must be done.
Yes, there is prejudice, and yes, she will fight it until the last.
Sometimes Remus sits next to her in class, as they're the two prefects to Gryffindor house. He's polite, unassuming, and witty in and offhand sort of way. He always makes pleasant company, even if he's absent frequently, and even if his friends are so annoying that she daydreams of hexing them.
"They have cared for me when no one else would," he's explained, after she decried their cruelty and arrogance at length.
She shrugged at this, neither arguing nor agreeing, and let it go. People like that are hard to come by, and Remus isn't the only one who's ever made excuses for the behavior of his friends.
When she thinks of Mary McDonald rendered wobbly and nearly hysterical from the exertion of running from hexes cast by Avery and Mulciber, the apex of the pyramid of malevolent Slytherin bastards, Lily has to force down the anger flaring within her. Not at Avery or Mulciber, because their brutality ceased surprising her long ago, but at one of their housemates, who insists on defending them.
"Just having a laugh, they were…" Severus Snape, so flippant toward the dark magic. But anytime she reminds him how completely evil some of the people in his house are, he drags Potter into it, insists that what they do is no worse than what Potter, Black, Pettigrew, and even Remus get up to. What the bloody hell Potter has to do with anything is beyond her comprehension, except that he and Severus hate each other with particular vitriol.
The one time Lily shouted at Severus over his choice of mates and threatened to stop speaking to him if he didn't at least try to distance himself from the killers in training, he looked so desolate, so lost, that she thought of the one time she saw his father strike him and decided to never raise her voice at him again.
Even so, she wants to seize him by his lapels and scream at him until she reaches some part of him that's been left untouched by ambition and starry-eyed surprise at a group of people who finally appreciate his ability. She wants to tell him about the nightmares that end in him cornering and killing her because she is a mudblood and that is what all Death Eaters do to her kind if given the chance.
On a free afternoon three weeks before OWLs, Lily sits on a boulder overlooking the lake with one leg crossed over her thigh. Everything about her paled this year, her skin becoming more translucent, paper-thin in a wry fascimile of the textbooks she takes to bed each night. Severus gazes at her in wonder and awe, attempts to match her revision hour for hour, but comes up short. A force of nature, she.
She doesn't even look up when she notices his presence, not even a head-tilt in his direction, and her voice is casually conversational, except for the low undertone of accusation.
"You've been with the Death Eaters again."
"They're not even Death Eaters," Severus returns, the old argument worn from overuse.
The book on her lap is hanging open, the pages jauntily flapping in the breeze. She snaps it shut, and finally, looks him straight in the eye.
"Yet."
There is a rift widening between them, one that began perhaps in third year when Severus laughed after Theodore Nott hexed Frank Longbottom for cheeking him. Or maybe earlier. Maybe it began the day the threadbare hat had called out Gryffindor for one child and Slytherin for another, that very first hairline crack.
Severus doesn't know how to tell her that he's trying keep the both of them safe, that he knows he can do it if he continues down the path she so detests. There are things he can learn from the likes of Mulciber, Nott, and Malfoy, and perhaps even the Dark Lord himself. Once Severus ascends through the ranks on the force of his knowledge and connections, no Death Eater would risk his retribution by harming Lily, and he could be safe from the likes of Potter and his father forevermore. For the first time in his life, he would cease existing as the butt of all jokes, as the "git of legendary greasiness."
While Lily tosses and turns in her high tower, he dreams in the dungeons of golden grandiosity, of being both renowned and feared, intoxicated by words that have passed, surprisingly unchanged, to and from the mouths of his housemates.
There is no good and evil. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it.
He has only ever wanted to protect her, he tells himself. The glory is secondary.
1973
After exchanging cordial greetings with the few friends Severus has, all in Slytherin, the pair of them sit in the dimly-lit library, their homework out in front of them as a pretext for their presence. The library is the only place they can talk without recieving strange looks for their proximity in relation to the color of their scarves.
"Why'd you tell them I was a halfblood?" Lily finally asks.
Severus sighs.
"Sometimes, being a Muggle-born…. it'll make things with the Slytherins difficult. They're traditional."
When she tilts her head to the side in curiosity, Severus tells her what he knows of history and the witch hunts. Back then, the only encounters between Muggles and Wizardkind were confrontational. Despite magic, Muggles had the upper hand in terms of raw numbers. They could compensate for their losses more readily.
Muggle-borns were a liability, Salazar Slytherin said. He used the wizards' fear of discovery to fashion his own ideology, casting out the Muggle-borns - now mudbloods - as villains and spies, as some sort of halfling link between real magical folk and those who wanted to kill them.
"They are to be avoided at all costs." Severus repeats the words of the long-dead wizard, somewhat proud of his expansive knowledge. He leaves out the rest that he had read. "Purged where possible. Mixing with them could taint the purity of magic, diluting our powers, thereby creating generations of medicore wizards at best, and squibs at worst."
"So they're afraid of me?"
"Not anymore. Now, the Pure-bloods just think they're better than the rest of us."
"What a load of utter bollocks." Lily pounds her hand on the table. The sound echoes through the nearly empty library like a thunderclap.
Severus deflates slightly. He rather liked the tales of Slytherin he'd heard as a child. He'd pilfered the heavier reading about Slytherin's beliefs from his mother's library. Before he'd met the Evanses, back when his only interactions with Muggles consisted of his father, and the brats at primary school, they had appealed to him. Muggles were definitely below wizards, perhaps subhuman. And mudbloods? They couldn't be much better.
Lily, she is an exception to the rule, just like her family. She is Lily Evans, and that is enough for him, even if it isn't enough for the Slytherins.
"I suppose," comes his timid response.
They find out she is a mudblood anyway, because she refuses to hide it. When she is finally asked her blood status by Professor Slughorn during fourth year, she proudly answers that she is the first witch in her family, much to the shock of everyone in the class.
It must be an effect of being in Gryffindor house, this brazen refusal to keep one's head down. But Severus can still save her, he knows he can.
1976
Lily sails through her OWLs effortlessly, her hours of frenzied study having paid off. During the Potions practical, she and Severus have an unspoken contest to see who can complete their respective brew first. His may have more ingredients, but hers requires more careful attention. They finish at about the same time, and argue goodnaturedly all the way from the examination room to the grounds and back again.
"You want to tell me my potion wasn't the right consistency, when the steam spirals coming from your cauldron weren't even crescents, Sev."
Severus stops walking, crosses his arms, and tries to look affronted except for the smile at the corners of his mouth."Always by the textbook, you are."
That's a laugh for them both. As if this redhead with a penchant for the radical, for insisting that Muggle Chemistry might have a place in the Potions classroom, has ever prepared a single solution solely by the textbook.
"Yes, well we can't all be the Half-Blood Prince, now can we?"
Severus snort-laughs at that. It's a nickname he fashioned for himself on a whim a year or so ago. He's come to be faintly embarrassed thinking of it; it feels like the moniker of one of those Muggles in tights – Superheros – he thinks they're called. But when Lily says it, there's something in the way she only says it when they're alone, in her gentle irreverence, or maybe just the way her mouth forms the syllables that makes it acceptably corny. So he lets her use it. And when he writes it out, even if he feels like an idiot doing so, he thinks of her.
It feels slightly strange acting this close again, after everything that has happened this year, after months of drifting apart. They're almost out of practice as friends, but it comes back to them like the refrain to a song they've heard many times before. By the time they're done talking exams and techniques and answers, it's nearly nightfall. She hugs him tightly before rushing up to the Gryffindor common room to revise for Charms.
That weekend, during a duel, Nott throws a curse at Gideon Prewett – a seventh year – that leaves him covered in gashes that splatter blood all over the walls of the unused classroom they were fighting in. Lily understands immediately what spell it is, because she knows the person who created it at the end of last year.
"Yeah, I mean, I just devised by accident, y'know, for the theory. Really, I was trying to create something else."
"And what spell could you possibly be trying to create that would result in that?" And then she realizes. She stares at him with something akin to disquiet."You wanted something to use against your father, didn't you?"
"You can't deny the bastard doesn't deserve it. I wouldn't use it unless he… my mum.. you know how he can get."
Lily sighs deeply, knowing anything she'd say to the contrary would go through one ear and out the other. Besides, if anyone on the face of the earth deserves to have such a curse used on them, it's Tobias Snape.
"No, I can't." Her eyebrows knot and unknot themselves. "Tell me there's a countercurse."
"There is."
"Swear you won't tell anyone else what it is or how to use it." She locks eyes with him in that intense way of hers. "Swear it, Sev!"
"I swear!" he says hastily.
Lily has particularly terrible dreams the night after Gideon's attack, and when Severus meets her gaze the next morning, there isn't even the fury he expected. In its place, lie dark circles of weariness and despair. He finds her in the library with her Arithmancy notes in her lap, face turned blankly toward the window, toward the overcast sky. Her careful, tiny scrawl about Wenlock's Third Axiom has been warped somewhat by water droplets dotting the parchment in front of her.
She doesn't even notice his existence until he sits down next to her, and when she inclines her head in his direction, it feels as if she's looking right through him. Two more tears roll in tracks down her face, one onto the floor and the other onto her notes.
He has never meant to make her this miserable. His voice comes softly, haltingly. "Lily." He shakes her shoulder.
"Lily."
When she focuses on his face, that hurts even more than the glassy stupor. She says nothing to him, the sorrow in her verdant eyes rendering them empty as two grottoes. Severus cannot recall hating himself as much as he does in this moment.
"I told them the countercurse to fix Prewett. And I'm sorry, Lily. I really am."
He makes to repeat the last sentiment, unsure if she's heard him, until she nods and turns away. He stumbles from the library, down, down past his common room, straight to his bedside and looks at himself in the mirror for a long time.
What am I becoming? The hours they spent laughing outside only two days ago feel worlds away from this moment.
What am I doing?
The answer comes with rote speed. Why, protecting Lily, of course. If that slight show of brutality, a reversible one at that, can unhinge her so, she definitely needs someone to make sure she comes to no harm. There lies only one way forward for Severus.. He will become powerful and protect them both. If only he could make her understand, if only he could do something to alleviate her pain, if only she weren't so damned squeamish.
True, Prewett hadn't deserved what he got, but Severus himself had gone and muttered the countercurse and set him right. That's what happens in duels, violence. Yes, he'd let the original spell slip to Nott in the first place, but Nott had promised to put in a good word about him to certain circles if Severus could show him something new. He didn't think the idiot would have ever actually used it.
And then, Lily, silly sentimental Lily with her morals that barely extend to the people in her house. She would almost excuse Potter just because the hexes he throws aren't "dark", just because she's friends with the Werewolf. Severus truly dislikes the way she thinks sometimes, wishes she'd come down off her high horse and take a gander at the real world. Full of resentment and self-loathing, he lies in bed for hours, coming to dinner in something of a fog before returning to the dorm. The other boys clamber in eventually, and then the lot of them talk about the patent pointlessness of Hogwarts education for what they plan to do once they leave school.
Tuesday night, Lily, Remus, and Alice Longbottom spend the night before Defense quizzing each other long into the night, stopping only when the Head Boy comes down at half past four to yell at them to go to bed.
"Makes you look as rebellious as Sirius," Remus murmurs to Lily once the seventh year boy is out of earshot.
Somewhat recovered from the events of the weekend, Lily quirks an eyebrow, grins, bids him goodnight, and does not have any nightmares that she can recall once Alice rouses her. Down in the Great Hall, the exam goes off without a hitch, the second to last on her formidable list, with only Transfiguration remaining.
It's not hard for her to drift off with her friends for a walk around the lake once the ancient Professor Marchbanks calls time. Somewhere close by, she can hear Potter's voice, the rise of its swaggering arrogance, and isn't sorry when her group takes an abrupt left turn and his speech fades into the distance. This afternoon, Lily decides, is for relaxing. Having made solid grades in McGonagall's class for the last five years, Lily doesn't feel any particular need to pore over any books now. She'll do some last minute revision with Remus tonight, but that's about it. Alice chatters about a Hufflepuff boy who has apparently asked her on the next and final Hogsmeade trip for the year. Lily lets her fingers drift through the cool water of the lake, here at its shallowest bank where little frogs hop between the cattails.
They're strangely cute, the frogs. She always misses them when she goes home. A peal of derisive laughter issues from somewhere nearby, jolting her from her thoughts.
"Scourgify!" A voice, male, shouts. More laughter. Alice stops talking.
Already at her feet, Lily, takes off for the source of the hex, and claps a hand to her mouth at the scene before her. Severus writhing, apparently also under the Impediment jinx, choking on soap bubbles, his wand several feet away from him. James, Sirius, Peter and a few onlookers all laughing and jeering, James the caster of the hexes affecting Severus. Whatever his faults, he does not deserve this.
"Leave him alone!" she screams at James, ready to duel him the Muggle way should he not relent. He takes his attention off taunting his prey, and does what he always does when he encounters Lily – asks her on a date, promises he'll never hex Severus again if she relents. She doubts the veracity of that statement sorely and insults him again.
Severus, having managed to inch off and recover his wand, fires off a curse, hitting James in the face, turning the bespectacled boy's right cheek into one long, grotesque laceration. Before Lily can be properly horrified at her friend's handiwork, James is up and in a flash of light, Severus is hanging upside down, his dingy underpants on display for everyone to see.
The display is so absurd and Lily so nervous that she has the impulse to laugh, but does not. Instead, she screams at James again, red hair flaring out around her shoulders, voice nearly cracking.
"Let him down!"
James obliges as only James would. Severus crashes into a wincing heap upon the ground, and Sirius takes advantage of this opportunity to Petrify him. This is too much for Lily, who screams a final time, "Leave him alone!"
She yanks her wand out of her robes and points it straight at the pair of boys, utterly consumed by fury, green eyes blazing. These poor excuses for Gryffindors, playing with fire, always setting the bait for Severus to rise to, driving him further into the Dark Arts, further away from reason and good. How can she persuade him with them around? She has only ever cursed someone once, but she knows what sort of forces she can wield, hexes that can dangle them upside down, break their legs, wipe the sick grins off their faces. Her hand shakes not out of fear, but out of rage.
James, one wary eye fixed on the woman in front of him, reluctantly lets Severus down, sighing. Lily lowers her wand in one fluid, straight-armed movement, still glaring daggers at the pair. James, of course, always has something to say, and turns his attention once more to the bitter stone-faced young man on the ground.
"There you go. Y'know, you're lucky Evans was here, Snivellus—"
At the mention of that nickname, Severus's face twists with humiliation, anger, and defiance.
"I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her," he spits. The group explodes in an uproar. More shouting all around.
Severus never forgets the look in her eye, the way the wand she'd brandished an inch away from James's chest drops to the grass. A thunderclap that doesn't make a sound. And then, the kind green eyes that Severus has come to associate with home, with the scent of flowers, and the crackle of magic, those eyes narrow into hateful slits.
Being dangled upside down is child's play compared to girl whose happiness once caused daisies to dance picking up her wand and striding steadily away, red hair rippling behind her.
Lily stumbles back into the common room in a sort of twilight stupor, as if she's had too much to drink. Severus, Sev, yes, he called me a mudblood. Her mouth opens but no words come out.Severus Snape, future Death Eater, he….
She winds her way around the spiral staircase, trembling, and when she reaches her four-poster bed, finally bursts into tears, wracking, tiring sobs that leave her gasping for breath. No doubt Sirius and James would be making good on their promise to hex him again, and yet that does not comfort her, no, she keeps crying. Blinded by tears, she knocks over the Transfiguration notes she'd stacked neatly on her bedside table, making no effort to gather them up. Dusk streams in warm tones into the darkened room, the way it does through the halls of the dead, throwing the dormitory into luminescence.
Every excuse she made, she realizes, has died and fallen away like so many autumn leaves. Bathed in a golden glow, she wipes the tears from her face, and curls up on the bed, still wearing her robes. Where the knife-point of betrayal twisted through her ribcage a mere hour ago, she feels only an overwhelming hollowness, the same one she felt on Sunday.
One day, Severus and his friends could kill her for being what she is, for the blood that runs through her veins.
Would he do it?
She doesn't know. She doesn't think so. Idly, she recalls that she also didn't think he'd ever use that word, throw it in her face with such venom, so perhaps anything is possible.
The thought of going down to dinner, of being surrounded by so many people all raucous and jovial, seems an impossible feat to her at the moment. She picks up her Transfiguration notes and changes quietly into a dressing gown.
"Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?"
"No," he says, finally. "It doesn't make any difference."
"Why did you lie to me?" she asks the empty air, brushing her damp hair out of her eyes with her free hand. "Why did you lie?"
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- ClF3