Title: He Did—A Story of Severus and Lily
It isn't often that a person has a life-changing experience at the age of seven. He did.
The dirty boy from Spinner's End with ragged clothes that covered up the bruises from his father's latest drinking binge recognized that from the moment he set eyes on the adorable red-haired girl with emerald eyes, his life wasn't going to be the same. He saw the fire that burned in her eyes each time she defended their friendship when her sister put her down for it, and he knew that he had made a friend for life.
He introduced her to magic, and when she got her letter to Hogwarts, he was the first one outside of her family to know.
They sat on the train together, that first ride to Hogwarts. She excitedly grabbed his hand as they walked up the stairs to go into the Great Hall to get sorted. It didn't matter to her, like it did to so many others, that because of his upbringing he knew more curses than many of the seventh years or that he was sorted into Slytherin. Petty house rivalries meant little to the girl who loved her friends with her whole being.
For their first five years, they managed to maintain their friendship. They studied in the back corner of the library and she always told off the Marauders when they pranked him.
Then the day came when the pressure to conform and be accepted by others beside her became too much for him. That day, when he called her the dirtiest insult that he could, he knew there would be no mending of their friendship.
That didn't stop her from continuing to defend him privately or from begging James to stop bothering him as a condition to going out. Seeing her with James made him all the more determined to get as far away from that abused little boy who just wanted to be loved and to finally let the darkness that she had been keeping away drown him.
Slowly, as he drifted closer and closer to Voldemort, she finally gave up trying to save him.
She never knew that he snuck into her wedding, watching the beautiful girl that he loved, though he wouldn't admit it to himself, get married to a man he wished he was.
Had he known that the prophecy he overheard that day would apply to her child, he would never have told Voldemort, and he would have switched to Dumbledore's side much earlier.
He vowed that he would do anything to protect her son. He did it just because she, even though he had turned his back on her, hadn't willingly turned her back on him.
Truth be told, it wasn't James' qualities that made him treat the skinny, malnourished boy with the scar on his forehead poorly, it was the good qualities in the boy, the ones from Lily that made it necessary for him to close off his heart.
That first Potions class he was shocked to see the boy taking notes on his customary first year speech. He shouldn't have been, because that was the same thing his mother had done in their first Potions class. The only way he knew how to react was in anger, because that's what his protection instinct was.
He saved him that day when his broom was jinxed and he tried to save him yet again when there was a loose werewolf on the grounds.
Everything he did was for her, even all of these years after her death.
When her eyes looked at him from her son's body, full of hatred and fear, and called him a coward, he took those words to heart. He, for all of his supposedly brave deeds while spying, had been a coward for never telling her how he felt.
Now, as the poison from Voldemort's snake slowly spread through his body, just as the darkness had poisoned his soul all those years earlier, he did one final thing for her.
When the darkness faded, he found himself back in that same park that he had first seen that red-haired fiery girl in all those years ago. He saw her again, this time older, swinging on a creaky old swing.
"Come on, Severus," she took his hand. She turned those eyes to him and smiled. "Thanks."
"For what?"
"They couldn't have done it without you."
And for reasons no one, except her son could possibly fathom, Severus Snape died with a smile on his face. It really is possible to have a life-changing experience at seven. He did.