Innocent by VerityEmory
As children, they were selected, or so Severus Snape had heard.
Albus Dumbledore could have confirmed the truth of this statement; the Headmaster had not been the hand that had plucked the young boy and girl from the flock, but his voice had guided it, given it direction.
The hand had belonged to a woman who had once been very beautiful, and of all people would be most adept at selecting candidates. And it was a very appropriate job for her, given her history.
Severus Snape did not know the name of this woman, nor was he particularly keen on finding out.
Albus Dumbledore, however, could have quite easily named her as Minerva McGonagall, had he been asked.
As a young woman, she had been very beautiful. This meant nothing thirty years later, when she sat nervously by Albus Dumbledore at that first sorting ceremony, the final choices written in her neat script, on a piece of paper now balled up in her hand.
But at seventeen, her dark eyes had been large and innocent; her wavy black hair had never been bound back from her face into a stern, forbidding bun. She had been a Gryffindor, brave and courageous and brilliant; he had been a Slytherin, cunning and clever and brilliant; they had been Head Boy and Head Girl.
The difference of houses and ambitions had not mattered. Then.
No one ever thought anything of them pairing off together at functions, or otherwise, because those were the sorts of things that Head Boy and Girl did.
And she had been so desperate to believe in him. He had loved her Ð of this she was sure.
But, thirty years later, she thought: it was not enough.
And in that, she was right. He had used her, betrayed her, loved her so.
Tom Riddle.
Unconsciously, she rubbed the ring finger of her left hand, where an engagement ring had once rested. She recalled the look of incomprehension in his eyes when she had thrown the emerald in his face.
The paper crunched in her right hand read: One Slytherin-destined pureblood boy of Gryffindor heritage into Gryffindor. One Slytherin-destined muggle-born girl into Gryffindor.
The Sorting Hat had always so loved conspiracies.
Severus had, as a boy, hated them. It was not as if they had been the better of him in everything; but at the least they were his equals, and for that he had despised them utterly.
Lily Evans: bright, charming, and beneath the ingenuous fa
