Disclaimer: I do not own the characters, settings, or concepts of the Harry Potter universe.
"Why am I still doing this to myself?" Lily thought with exhaustion, making her way through the dimly-lit halls of Hogwarts. "...Why did he have to sound so mature?"
It wasn't her intention to walk into the Hospital Wing and start berating her childhood friend. After all, Severus was hurt far worse than she had ever seen before, and it scared her half to death to see him so deathly still down by the lake. It took all of her self-control to not send a flurry of curses towards James Potter when she briefly thought that the Slytherin had been killed on accident.
Lily's visit had been one of concern for his health, along with a last-ditch effort to try to show Severus that she still cared. But it didn't seem to matter. He started the conversation in the same, prickly way he always had. Actions were what spoke loudest to Severus. It was why she intervened during the attack at the Great Lake, yet even that did little to temper the boy's anger. It didn't stop him from using that spell as payback to Potter when she had everything under control.
"Is that why you smiled?" she recalled the empty, almost lifeless way Severus had asked her the question.
If she wasn't trapped in the heat of the moment and her rising emotions, such a question would have cut through her. Of course it had been cruel to smile at all. Even if Severus had fought back, her friend was being humiliated before a group of immature, cheering teenagers. Smiling, even as briefly as she did...had been cruel.
"Severus...why did you have to fight back using that spell? You could have used anything else...ANYTHING…why Sectumsempra?" she shivered.
Her footsteps were the only noise that echoed across the castle corridors. It wasn't her turn to patrol the halls for Prefect Duty, so it wouldn't do well to remain in the halls for too long after curfew.
Why did it always have to be dark magic when it came to Severus? Why was he so drawn to the very reason why so many people were afraid of him? Why was it okay for him to laugh off outright dangerous, and hurtful magic, and still call Muggleborns that awful slur when he promised her that blood made no difference?
"It doesn't"
Lily stopped in her tracks, remembering those simple words. How Severus sounded so genuine...and so mature...once he finally calmed down and stopped letting his anger rule him. It would have been so easy for her to accept his apology on the spot and pull him in for a hug.
But how could she, when not one day earlier, she was blown off after setting aside some time so they could both do some last minute refresher studies on the Ancient Runes exam? And how, after waiting patiently for nearly a whole hour for him to show, she overheard Severus, Avery, and Mulcibur looking quite suspicious in the Restricted Section of the Library. And how he was distinctly, incantation, wand movement and all, telling them of that horrible spell that he had been perfecting.
Sectumsempra.
The very thought that Severus, her childhood friend, her rock, the one who had introduced her to the magical world that she loved so much, was capable of such ruthless aggression...it was the subject of many a spat between the two for the past few months. And the fact that he had skipped time that she had hoped to spend with him, in favor of bragging about such a violent spell that he intended to use against enemies was one of the many things that had sent Lily into crying fits when she slept throughout most of fifth year.
She was losing him. And it didn't seem to matter what she said or did, nothing ever seemed to get through to him. He had been caught saying that horrible word multiple times, focused more on trying to ingratiate himself to the militant Slytherins, and created his own, signature weapon.
Early on, he tried to lie to her about its purpose. With little success.
"It's just a cutting spell...something I can use to help me prepare ingredients in Potions." he would mumble half-heartedly.
"Then use Diffindo." she responded with growing frustration. "Why on Earth would you create a bloody sword to do precision work when the rest of the wizarding world uses a magical knife?!"
Then she had seen it. Scribbled in the margins of his secondhand Potions textbook. The truer, darker purpose of what he spent so much of his free time perfecting - For Enemies.
Lily had never taken offense to Severus defending himself from James Potter's attacks, though there were plenty of times when the Slytherin boy himself had instigated the violence. No. Self-defense was not the question. It was how obsessively he had been working on something he intended to use in order to mutilate someone...or worse.
"Password?" the Fat Lady's portrait had asked, suddenly jarring Lily out of her thoughts. She had made it all the way up to Gryffindor Tower on autopilot amidst her pondering.
"Oh...yes. Philosopher's Stone." she stammered before the door swung open and she made her way into the Common Room.
"...That is the sort of thing that he should be putting his efforts into." she continued thinking to herself. "Making a Philosopher's Stone...solving the mystery of how to fly."
Lily sat down on one of the plush sofas that stood next to the cozy fireplace. Given that it was the time for end-of-year exams, there wasn't a single student besides her in the common room. That was just as well. It was doubtful that she would get to sleep tonight until she had time to sift through her own thoughts.
"He's brilliant enough to do anything he puts his mind to...yet all he cares about is making a bloody weapon to give himself an edge over his enemies."
That was the person that Severus had been growing into. Angry...hateful, bitter, and if he was questioned about any of it, he would avert his eyes and mumble something about James Potter. His deflection was perhaps the worst trait of all in Lily's eyes, because she could never talk to him about it without the subject being derailed into a conversation completely unrelated. Communication between the two had become so toxic that Lily was starting to buy into the words of her other friends that she should just let go and realize that the good in him was gone.
Or at least it had been...until the strange conversation in the Hospital Wing. Clearly, there was still anger there. But it had been Severus...Severus Snape of all people who stopped the conversation from devolving into an all-out shouting match and gone out on a limb. He took the first step and apologized. Despite how mortified he must have been from the scene at the lake, to her being there as he vomited, and how hurt he must of been, both physically from the concussion, and emotionally from the fact that in the briefest of moments, she took satisfaction in his embarrassment.
Now that Lily had put some time and distance between her and the situation, she felt a void beginning to creep into her chest. "You actually smiled...and if that wasn't enough, you had the audacity to plunge the knife even deeper by defending yourself when he called you out on it."
She let out a shudder, her lips frowning as she looked up at the portrait of the mighty lion that hung over the fireplace.
"Not a very shining example of Gryffindor chivalry...was it, Aslan?" Lily choked as the tears returned again. Her intentions for the night had been to study for the Ancient Runes O.W.L. in an attempt to shore up her weakest subject. Instead, all she could do was quietly sob, realizing how very nearly she had come to losing her best friend on this terrible, terrible day.
Author's Note: During the time that I was listing things that I wish I had done in Tempus Vita, one of those things that I wished I had done was properly articulate the things that were going on in Lily's head at regular intervals. Even though this is a story that is focused primarily on Severus, as he is the central character, and the one that by far, goes through the most changes, Lily is the other half of the equation.
Point of view shifts mid-chapter were a bit disorienting, and I decided that the proper way to do it was to have Lily's point of views be their own chapters.
As I alluded to last time, I don't think I did a proper enough job of showing just how close these two had come to losing everything. Obviously, readers are free to interpret things as they will, but in my eyes, as I read 'The Prince's Tale', there is more there than just calling Lily a Mudblood. She makes mention that he calls EVERY Muggleborn a Mudblood, which is a direct betrayal of her hopeful question that she asked him when they were children. Did he mean it when he said it to her? Of course not. But Lily can't just be the exception to an ugly Slytherin rule.
The last point: Sectumsempra. In Tempus Vita, alluded to it being one of the things that drove the biggest wedge between Severus and Lily, but I feel I didn't really push the envelope quite enough with it. I had Lily be afraid of it...I had it be one of the triggers of her Boggart, but I wished I had gone into greater detail of why it's so important to Lily that Severus made that promise in the previous story. There will be more discussions about Sectumsempra later.
Another, unrelated note, is the addition of Lily looking at the Gryffindor Lion and naming it Aslan (the lion character from Chronicles of Narnia). Given that in Tempus Vita, Lily's father Jasper Evans was a writer of children's fiction (something that will carry over into Viridi) I wanted Lily to have a childish little quirk of having named the symbol of her house after a character in a popular piece of children's literature that she might have read growing up. "Aslan" is just there to function as a little guiding light for Lily from time to time, the virtues of the character being a parallel that Lily herself aspires to follow.
As always, thank you all for reading, and please consider taking the time to review! It really does help, and the more detailed, the better! Shoutout to TJ Jordan who has left some absolutely spectacular and thought-provoking stuff in the review section. It means a lot!