Lily
L
Amortentia is always the one Severus dreads the most. The week that he teaches it, Severus would try several things to get around the problem. At first he would drink a potion that would stop his sense of smell. Unfortunately, that resulted in a rather nasty lab accident that sent several students to the hospital the first year he taught it. He had been unable to catch the scent of a potion going awry.
The next year he tried something a little different to distance himself. He tried using an unnaturally strong amount of pepper-up potion to counteract the incredible despair he knew he would feel. It worked to a degree, but it seemed he was too happy. In fact, he was so happy that his students feared something was wrong and Madame Pomfrey was called. Severus was submitted to the hospital wing with a psych evaluation for once, and Albus, oh Albus was even worse, he came bearing sweets and watched Severus over half-moon speckles with his all too knowing gaze and his pity. It was more than Severus could bear.
The next year he tried something that he truly believed would work. Instead of focusing on himself, he got a plant. A plant that sat on his desk and would eat up negative emotions. Unfortunately, it turned out a student in the class had recently learned of their parent's death and the plant began to eat at the child's emotions so strongly and grow so quickly that the students were afraid of the plant. The child was deeply affected by the events and the strange emotions it incited in him in his time of grieving and the plant was outlawed from the school. In addition, Severus received a very stern lecture on messing with the emotions of students – and Severus lost the heart to argue with Dumbledore about all the other ways in which Hogwarts emotionally scarred students.
That was when he stopped trying anything at all. That first year was the worst. He procrastinated and put it off as long as he possibly could, but he could not avoid it forever. It was a potion, how could he, a professor of potions, be afraid of potions? And yet he was just a little. When the time came he taught his students everything he could about it. It happened far too quickly.
The scent, the overpowering scent of Lily, of the dew filled grass on Saturday mornings that they'd play on as children, of the honeysuckles they would pick, of the fresh scent of the lake they sometimes swam in. It filled the potions classroom so entirely that Severus trembled with shock and despair, in lost love and lost friendship. He missed her so terribly, the scent so strong he could almost see her bright green eyes staring into his dark, cold ones.
He walked through the classroom, shocked that no one seemed to notice the state he was in, of one who was very ready to burst into tears. It became too much to bear about ten minutes in, so he turned his back to his students so that they could not see him and dismissed the class, holding back a sob.
He cried when they left, tears falling freely once more. He drank himself to a coma that night after all his classes left and once again wished for nothing but death's cruel hands to come for his neck. It never came, it never gave him that mercy, that kindness. Severus could almost laugh at the irony. Life was never kind to him, but it seemed neither was death, or it would have come for him.
It got better after that. Severus began to occlude during his classes, distance himself from it all, from everything. He focused heavily on his students and acted as close to his normal self as he possibly could. Dumbledore probably noticed something was wrong on those days, occluding was not good for his mental health, but luckily had the good sense to say nothing at all.
The worst of it came when it was time to teach Harry Potter's class. Severus did the same thing he did every year, occlude, occlude like nothing he could do before, barking at Gryfinndor's, reducing points, praising Slytherin. He followed the pattern, he was normal and he did everything he could to show it.
When Lily's scent pervaded the room like nothing before Severus hardly noticed, he was too busy occluding, compartmentalizing his feelings. He hid them in a box and stored them away. Until he slipped. The mistake came in looking directly into Harry's eyes – Lily's eyes. Those emerald irises took him straight back to the greatest days of his life.
He saw himself in those eyes. He saw Lily in them. He saw Lily take his hand on a moonlit night and show him fairies in the forbidden forest, he saw himself show Lily a new spell he learned. He saw many things in those eyes. And he wished he were dead because the scent of those memories was all he had.
"50 points from Gryfinndor!" Severus barked, hoping the sound in his throat went unnoticed by the students. Luckily, they were too focused on their own potion, their own scent, as Severus took out his rage at life, his pent up emotions on Neville, before occluding again, and falling into a sweet nothingness like he needed to.
He would see those eyes again and they would be like the scent. Severus drank again that night for the first time in a long time. Dumbledore didn't question him when he didn't come for dinner.
