Severus was shaking as he reached his quarters, and for once it wasn't due to exposure to the Cruciatus. The door slammed behind him soundly and he immediately raised his wand.
"Expecto Patronum!"
He hadn't been wrong about what he'd seen in Dumbledore's office. The doe that had been his companion for as long as he'd been able to cast this spell was not nearly as clear or as crisp as she had always been. Patronuses were, by definition, wispy, but this was different. The edges of her seemed to shift and blur between features. Some of the silvery wisps steaming off seemed to make the shape of a swishing tail for a moment, barely visible in the half-light.
"No," he breathed, and sagged against the wall, staring at the doe in front of him. She stood calmly on the floor, waiting to be told what to do with nothing to defend him from. But even as he watched her right front hoof dissipated completely before reforming. "Lily… no…"
He knew that great emotional upheaval could cause Patronuses to change. The gossip in the Order about Tonks and her affections for the fleabag, the shift they caused her Patronus, were proof enough. Yet his Patronus was more than some random animal. He knew precisely why his Patronus was a doe, clung to the person who had caused it with a desperation that now shocked him as he felt his knees give under him. Severus slid down the door and hit the ground hard.
How was this possible? Nothing had changed, there were no great emotions to be found in his life that hadn't already been there before. So what could have caused it, this last trace of Lily Evans – Evans, not Potter – that was still his to hold, to leave him? Was he being punished? Was this the result of all the sins he had committed, built over time, finally made manifest? He knew that he was the only one among the Dark Lord's followers that could cast the spell, and the way they were all steeped in Dark magic made the cause of that easy to deduce. So had he finally crossed some sort of unseen threshold, where he'd done more bad than good?
Severus ended the spell and pulled from the depths of his memory something that had always warmed him, even over two decades later. Himself and Lily, sitting by the side of that pond among the trees on a blanket from her home. He lounged on it, breathing in the smell of cotton and roses – of Lily – as he told her about Hogwarts. She had stared at him with so much awe, so much hope, so much longing, and he had convinced himself that those feelings were for him, not the school. It had made him feel important, wanted, for the first time in his young life.
"Expecto Patronum!" Severus cast again, but before the words even left his lips he knew it wouldn't work. The details of the memory were slightly blurry before him. Had it been spring or summer? Were the little wild violets that populated that place blooming yet or not? Lily, what color had she been wearing? Her hair, was it up or down? Once upon a time he could have plotted the exact path of freckles across her nose and yet now…
The patronus was no different. It flickered, faded, and returned in different parts. She calmly paced towards them and he swore her hoof changed from its cloven form to something solid for a second as she bowed her head and nosed his knee. He recoiled. His patronus had never been playful with him before. Lily's doe was always elegant and lovely and ethereal. With a jerk of his wand the doe vanished again.
Desperate now he summoned up a memory of something else, determined to figure out what or who had caused this shift in him, a shift he hadn't even noticed but was apparently quite literally altering who he was. The most obvious choice was Potter, and he summoned to the forefront of his mind a memory of the girl. Nothing special, she was just standing in her lab, bent over a cauldron. Bathed in steam she had looked up at him when he stepped inside and beamed, like she was beyond delighted to see him. The memory continued on with her babbling about some improvement or another she'd made to the potion she was working on but he held the image of her smiling at him, eyes glowing, and cast a third time.
"Expecto Patronum!"
The doe came but after a moment he noticed that she seemed even weaker than she had before. The shifting and fading seemed to have picked up pace and become more dramatic. The lower half of a back leg vanished like it had been blown apart by a strong wind and then reformed a second later. Severus grit his teeth. Something to do with Potter then, and that gave him a horrible, swooping sense of realization in his stomach. There was only one thing that could be the source of this change in him.
Lying to himself had never been something he partook in. It was a great way to put himself in danger, but now he had to. For the sake of his sanity, the sake of his mission, he had to. All of this, every moment of torture he'd endured, every act of violence he'd committed to gain information that would save others later had been done in her name, in Lily's name. If he no longer held her tightly in his heart then he didn't know if he could force himself to attend the next meeting, submit to the torture again, stare into those twinkling blue eyes during a report and pray that what he'd suffered for would be of use to someone.
He picked himself up from the ground and banished the doe from him, suddenly horrified by it as if it were an Inferi reaching for him. Severus staggered for the door. There was a sense of fleeing inside of him, as if by leaving the castle where he'd had this realization behind it would take him away from the reality of the situation. He left the castle, left the grounds. Severus was halfway to Hogsmeade before it occurred to him that he had nowhere to go, but on the heels of that thought came the acknowledgement that yes he did and that was exactly where he both needed to be and feared to go.
Severus wondered when the next time he arrived at Amity's without being in a state of crisis would ever come as he turned and stepped into nothingness. At the very least it was still a reasonable hour as he appeared in her living room and looked around. The room itself struck him like a punch in the gut. The decorations, the furnishings, they were so different from the austere rooms he kept in the castle, not a trace of anything magical to be found. Amity had nothing tying her to their world except for himself and Potter and all they had done was bring her worry and danger. How dare they do such a thing to her? This loss of Lily suddenly felt bitterly fair. He had brought suffering on a woman who didn't deserve it and in turn she had taken a piece of his identity and set it beyond his reach no matter how he stretched.
"Black is the color of my true love's hair. His lips are like a rose so fair. He has the sweetest face and the gentlest hands. I love the ground on which he stands."
A soft, lilting voice was playing from the radio in the corner and Amity's voice echoed it from the kitchen. He was only half surprised when her voice pitched louder and she called,
"You know, I specifically requested that you called before you appeared randomly the next time."
Severus sagged and every part of him wanted to flee back to the school, and yet he found himself drawn into the kitchen. Amity stood there in her pajamas, a pair of shorts and a vest. She turned on her toes to face him and smiled, cocking her head. She gestured to the bowl in front of her which held ice cream drowning in caramel sauce and sprinkles.
"I would have made you a sundae of your own." She winked at him. "It would do you good to get a little sweetness in you."
It occurred to him that he was close to averaging one surprise visit a month and anyone else would have probably become short with him about it by now. But Amity merely picked up her treat, dug a second spoon from the cutlery drawer, and started for the living room.
"Come on," she trilled, and crooked her finger at him in a gesture that was seductively inviting. She didn't so much as blink or give him a hard look for infringing on her home, her hospitality. In spite of everything their world threatened her with she still welcomed him into her safe little harbor without thought and he as grateful beyond words for that.
"So, do you still want to murder that little Hufflepuff that can't spell to save his life?" Amity asked casually as she seated herself on the sofa. He sat down next to her and wasn't even remotely surprised when she pressed herself against his thighs. A napkin spread over their thighs and she set the bowl down. Amity dug her spoon in and offered his to him. She popped a bit of ice cream in her mouth and hummed happily. It was so painfully normal, something he'd never in his life experience, not even with Lily, and he knew precisely who had interrupted his patronus.
He couldn't even be mad at her for it," he mused, trying to resist the urge to lean into the human warmth pressed against his side as he dipped his spoon into the ice cream and took a bite. It was almost painfully sweet, and yet he wouldn't change the moment for anything. These were Raincrow's gifts to him, they always had been, normalcy and acceptance. She would never know how much they meant to him.
"If I hadn't attended school with his parents I would wonder if one of them was actually a troll," Severus commented, and Amity giggled. Her form shook with her mirth next to him and there was something oddly pleasant about the way her smiling lips shaped themselves around her spoon as she took another bite.
"Not everyone can be magical Einstein," she teased, her shoulder nudging his, and she might not be able to see but that did nothing to diminish the warmth in her eyes as she pressed just a little bit closer to him.