Written for Hogwarts' Notable Witches & Wizards: Task #8: Write about an unrequited love.
Also for the Pokemon Challenge: Mankey - King's Cross, Word: Flower, Dialogue: "It was all a misunderstanding.", Genre: Angst, the Writing Club: Book Club - Eddie's Dad: (emotion) bitterness, (plot point) not talking to someone for a long time, (word) damage, Showtime: Little Fall of Rain - (object) flowers, Lyric Alley: in the graveyard doing handstands, Sophie's Shelf: Carmelita Spats - write about someone self absorbed, Emy's Emporium: Temur Khan - write about someone losing everything they have, Film Festival: (emotion) guilty, Cocktail Corner: Whiskey - (plot point) write about someone drowning their sorrows.
Word count: 405
mon amour
Severus wasn't quite sure what had brought him out there, to the one place he had sworn never to visit.
The alcohol, probably. He could feel it burning in his veins still, his body oddly weightless, his mind unencumbered in the way it only ever got when he was intoxicated.
It made him hate himself a little more, how much he needed this to cope with everything.
But especially with this.
Lily's grave was… It was beautiful, in the way graves usually were. It was elegant and flowers littered the ground — stupid well wishers who probably had never even known her but wanted to pay their respects to the mother of their damned savior — but it wasn't Lily.
Lily had been vibrant and colorful and she would never stop moving, not even once. This grave was so far from that it ripped out a painful chuckle from his mouth, scraping his lungs raw on its way out.
He knelt down — fell to his knees, rather. It hurt, but it was nothing he didn't deserve. He was the one who had put her there, after all. Six feets under, and this would forever be the closest he could ever get to her again.
"It was all a misunderstanding," he said, mumbling to himself and the dirt, fingers reaching up to trace the letters of her name on the stone, Lily, Lily, Lily, the only word he would ever need to know. "It was all just a misunderstanding," he repeated. His vision blurred but he didn't bother wiping his cheeks.
"Things weren't supposed to go this way." And he could see it all unfold in his mind's eyes, how Lily would have loved him, if it wasn't for that one small mistake that had cost him so much and caused so much damage.
How they would have been together, happy and safe — how she would have loved him and he would have loved her, and he would never have ended up bent over her grave, drunk and grieving, wishing the world otherwise.
"You were supposed to love me." The words stuck in his throat, bitter and thick. "I'm sorry." He repeated these words so many times they came to feel meaningless, closer to the void growing inside his soul than to anything else.
Finally, he stood up, knees cracking. He caressed the letters that formed her name once more, fingers trembling, and left.