Maybe he didn't want to tell Lily Evans a second time that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. Or maybe he couldn't bear to be told a second time by the woman he loved that he should get on with his life and leave her alone. But Severus Snape had done, well, precisely that. He had not seen Lily in ten years.
It was 7:30 on Saturday evening, and an odd mixture of dread and excitement had settled into the depths of Severus's stomach. Or rather, he knew he was supposed to be dreading the upcoming conversation, but there he was, half an hour early, just waiting to watch her walk through that door.
As it turned out, he didn't have to wait long. Lily, too, was early.
She looked like she was cut straight from of Severus's dreams. There were the green eyes that shone like a pair of beacons, casting a warm light on everything they focused on. And then there was the long red hair, flowing like stormy waves crashing against a moonlit shore. If Severus Snape was a rock, then Lily Evans was an island, beautiful and fearless in the face of a tumultuous ocean.
Or, if instead you chose to believe the story Madam Rosmerta would later tell the crowds of drunken witches and wizards that night, then Lily Evans tore through the front door of the Three Broomsticks like a hurricane, her eyes glowing as if bolts of lightning were about to shoot out from them.
The woman whose green eyes, one way or another, sparkled, walked quickly and purposefully towards Severus. She leaned over the table, her face only a few feet from his. "Let's get one thing straight, Sev," she said with a petrifying stare. "What's my son's name?"
When Severus finally regained the ability to talk, his voice was that of a stone gargoyle. "Harry. Harry Potter."
"Good. Then you will stop confusing him with his father and stop trying to terrorize an eleven-year-old boy over a twenty-year-old grudge." She sat down in the chair opposite Severus. "Now," she said with a tone of finality, "to important matters."
He had decided ahead of time that the best strategy would be to get out ahead of the outrage storm. "Lily, there's no other way to say this. I screwed up. Screwed up in so many ways. And I know you were writing me, but I couldn't bring myself to answer your letters, not after what I had done."
Lily furrowed her brow, staring quizzically at her former best friend. "And what exactly did you…do?"
"What do—everything that happened that day was my fault, Lily. I gave Voldemort the prophesy, and when I realized he was coming for you, I panicked and tried to save you, but I just made things worse."
The quizzical look intensified. "That's your story?"
"Er…yes?"
Lily leaned back in her chair and almost chuckled. Almost.
"Really, Sev? You're telling me that when I sent you all those owls ten years ago, and you ignored them and avoided me all this time, it was because you were too scared that I would be mad at you?"
Seems reasonable, since you're mad at me now, were words that Severus thought but definitely did not say.
"And here I was, wondering how my old friend had veered so far to the Dark side as to regret defying Lord Voldemort in order to save my family."
The words hit Severus like a charging erumpent.
"You thought I would rather have let Voldemort win? You thought I would rather have seen you all die, and that was why I didn't want to talk to you?"
"Well you should've opened your mail, then," she replied bitterly. "You could've done something. Heck, the Severus Snape I remember would've slept outside my front door until he could apologize to me."
Severus's dream world was entering the twilight zone of illogic. "You're—you're not making a big deal about the prophesy, or about me letting Voldemort get to Harry, but you're mad that I didn't talk to you afterwards?"
"Don't be silly, Sev. Of course I was mad at you for everything. But," Lily continued, failing for the first time that night to meet Sev's gaze, "I really did want to talk to you. That much was true. You could've, at least, saved me a lot of time." She closed her eyes for a long second. "Do you know how I finally proved for certain you were the one under Polyjuice? I had to go to Ollivander's with Harry three weeks ago, and when Ollivander was trying to find Harry a wand, he started trying the twins of all of my old friends' wands, including Peter's. That's when I realized why you looked so strange under Polyjuice. You used your own wand."
Severus worked hard to stifle a gasp. It had never before made any sense to him why he was supposed to use his own wand that fateful night, but Felix Felicis had urged him to do so. And now he wondered what else Felix might be useful for…
Lily charged on, not noticing a thing. "You could've told me, said anything, but no, you just had to vanish as mysteriously as you came. It's not easy piecing together a story when the only other witness refuses to talk to you. Didn't you want to know everything, to understand everything? Weren't you curious at least about what I had been doing before the attack? How I had defied the Dark Lord thrice?"
Severus sputtered. "I—how could I face you, Lily? I hated myself for what I'd done—how could I possibly look at you in the eye with any dignity?" He wanted to keep going, to tell her how hard it had been, the inescapable shame mixed with the unbearable loneliness, but he pulled himself back. Even though it had been ten years, he just couldn't. It was…too soon.
Instead, he took a long swig from the glass in front of him.
"I just needed you to be a friend, Sev. You came back for one night to help me, and then you disappeared." She looked tired, and maybe that was why she couldn't stop the next words from coming out. "It was just like Hogwarts, just like you'd left me all over again."
Severus nearly choked on his drink. His voice rose, tinged with indignation. "What? Lily, I made a mistake in our fifth year, and you turned your back on me. I had nowhere to turn, no one else to talk to. I wouldn't have joined the Death Eaters for good, Lily, but you left me."
Lily scoffed. "Keep telling yourself that, Sev. No, you left me a long time before fifth year. Avery and Mulciber! That gang of yours, they did things to us Gryffindors that were far worse than anything James ever did to you! And you, my best friend, just continued to defend them." Her voice acquired a sharp edge that frightened Severus a little. "So don't you accuse me of anything, Severus Snape, when you're the one who put me through Hell for years."
The two former best friends sat in silence for seconds that seemed like hours, both thinking to themselves, How did we end up here?
"This was a mistake," Lily finally declared. "I have to go." She stood up abruptly.
Severus's mouth suddenly unstuck itself as a desperate urge overcame him. Now that he had seen her again, he couldn't let her get away. "Lily—wait!"
But it was too late. Lily Evans had disapparated with an unusually loud crack, leaving behind nothing but…
Severus nearly tripped over his own cloak as he lunged towards the chair at the other side of the table. Lying on the seat of that chair, twitching ever so slightly, was a slender, pale white finger.
Lily Potter was quite sure now that she'd completely lost her touch. It was really so like Lily Potter: Single Mother to bring up Hogwarts at every possible opportunity, even though Lily Potter: Member of the Order of the Phoenix or even Lily Evans: Head Girl would've wanted to slap her in the face. Slipping so far like this wasn't supposed to happen, not to people who used to have lots of friends and married Quidditch superstars and had magical powers.
Then again, people with magical powers were supposed to be smart enough not to disapparate in the middle of a conversation and get themselves splinched.
Lily was sitting on her front porch, back against the polished exterior of her front door, and began to slowly bang her head against it. She'd already tried apparating back, but Destination, Determination and Deliberation were a bit harder to focus on when one of your fingers had just popped clean off your hand. She tried summoning a Patronus next, even though she knew that making one required only marginally less concentration than apparating. Happy thoughts, Happy thoughts, she said to herself. Not Evil. Not Evil.
She'd managed only a faint wisp of silvery smoke when a faint pop signaled the arrival of another soul to her corner of Godric's Hollow. A loud bang a half-second later reunited her with the index finger of her left hand.
"You still live here?" asked Sev, helping her up to her feet. "I was worried you'd moved after..."
"Oh, no, I couldn't move," she said, sparing him the burden of completing his sentence. "Too many memories here. It's not the sort of thing you can walk away from."
Severus Snape's attention, however, had drifted past the meticulously groomed chrysanthemums blooming in the garden, past the smoothly painted yellow walls, past Lily Evans herself, to the first-floor window through which a familiar scene smiled back at him. He saw the familiar green lawn, the familiar sparkling clear water, the familiar shadowy trees looming in the background. Children bustled back and forth—they weren't quite so familiar, as he couldn't make out any of their faces from that far away—and the giant squid floated lazily on the surface of the lake, splashing water on anyone who got too close.
It was, in short, the most amazing painting Severus had ever seen, and as if some great force had glued his muscles in place, he could do nothing—wanted to do nothing—but stare and stare and stare. And it wasn't just because the scene of Hogwarts was familiar…
"I understand. Dealing with whiny thirteen-year-olds wouldn't be worth it if it wasn't Hogwarts."
And now something was pushing him, urging him to close the deal, now that the hazy, dreamlike quality of his vision had dissipated, now that everything finally made sense. He knew what Lily Evans had gone through, because he had gone through the exact same thing.
"You know," he ventured, "we never really got to talk about anything remotely recent. I've seen some ridiculous things happen at the school, for sure."
Lily appraised her old friend, and might have even cracked the smallest smile. "Next time, Sev. Next time we won't bring up any of these sad old stories."
They were the most beautiful words Severus had ever heard. "I'll owl you." He apparated back to Hogsmeade and began the short walk back to the castle, his left hand aimlessly fingering the small glass vial that he always kept his pocket. It was sealed shut with a wad of wax and filled to the brim with a happy-looking golden liquid.
Lily Potter shut the door behind her, walked past her wall-sized painting of the Hogwarts grounds, and descended purposefully down the stairs. After navigating the labyrinth of cauldrons and cupboards that was her basement, she reached a small, dusty shelf at the back of the room. As she had done countless times before, she tapped her wand three times on the lid of a jar that held a single bezoar suspended in oil.
Immediately, a giant sinkhole opened up underneath her, but she didn't even flinch. She glided down gently to the newly-revealed floor eight feet below her, already eying the wall of her private study that would soon be undergoing a major renovation.
She was falling into the middle of a large, squarish dungeon that was plastered with so many pictures and newspaper clippings that the rough, gray stone wall behind them was visible only in a few select spots. The pieces of paper themselves were covered in circles and scribbles made with all colors of ink—red and gold, green and silver, blue and bronze. In a few places, a quill seemed to have been insufficient, and large words had been painted over the canvas of photographs with a thick brush.
She made her way to a particularly messy corner of the room, marveling as she did so at the long hours she had wasted sitting there, concocting absurd theories that, at best, made little sense. But then again, she remembered how dark those days after her husband's death were. There was Sirius screaming his head off, chomping at the bit to go look for Peter and tear him to pieces. There were her Gryffindor roommates—and supposed friends—who invariably oscillated between relief that someone else had taken care of Lord Voldemort and tearful heartbreak at the death of their beloved dashing quidditch hero, James Potter. There was the bed that was much too big for one person, with the pillows that she would never wash, because they still smelled of her dead husband. And there was the inescapable feeling that the only person who could save her from the loneliness—the craziness, the never-ending nightmare—had come to her house only to vanish and never write her back.
It was that last feeling that had created the particular wall at which Lily now stared.
The mess was much too personal to just wave a wand at, Lily decided. She conjured a stool, climbed on top of it, and began tearing pictures and clippings down one by one. Slowly, the ink-stained memories fluttered to the floor. A page ripped from a potions textbook, with hand-written words circled in emerald green: For Enemies. A picture of a glossy, pernicious-looking dark purple stone. A photograph of a scowling twelve-year-old boy, his greasy jet-black hair twitching like a gorgon's locks.
All those years of thinking, and worrying, and circling, and a five-minute conversation made it look like the biggest waste of time ever. Really, it only took one good look at him before a gleeful voice began parading around in Lily's head. Sev, evil? it mocked. In what universe?
