Chapter Two
"Mr. Potter, our newest . . celebrity."
Thwap! Tuney's left sandal smites the bastard square on the nose and flips away from the screen. Fist balled in impotent fury, Lily wishes his imperious conk would poke through the veil between life and death so that she could take a swing at it.
"Pick on someone your own size, wanker!" Spoiling for a fight, she stands up to stretch her legs. Onscreen, face unhealthily pale, his lips drawn so tight it must hurt him to speak, Severus glides the aisles like a hawk circling for prey. Harry looks utterly bewildered, poor love. God, what Lily wouldn't give to be able to climb through that screen into that classroom and hex Snivellus in front of the entire complement of first years. No, jinxing's better. If her memories of the git are anything to go by, he can likely endure any amount of torture, but ridicule makes him mental. She can't decide who deserves it more, Severus or Tuney. How could they abuse her child like this? Didn't they care for her at all?
For that matter, she ought to drag Albus into some secluded spot and tell him exactly what she thinks about his hiring practices. She vaguely recalls him mentioning the reason he brought Snape in as potions master, but she's forgotten, and really, there's no excuse. This is a flaming arsehole who should have all rights to co-existing in the same room with children – in the same castle, even – revoked.
Pacing, she spots a pack of smokes sitting on an end table, and her eyes narrow. It's been years, but – blast, this is all Snape's fault. The memories stirred up by watching the telly have brought back details she thought she'd laid to rest. Like Severus risking a violent row by nicking his da's fags so he and Lily could slope off to the canal and smoke themselves sick. Bulrushes fringed the water, and they'd flattened down the stalks to create a small, secret grotto. Sev could be a bloody nut job about the importance of hiding places. But then, he was never so relaxed as on those long afternoons, leaning back on his bony elbows with his face tilted to the sky, his hair hanging down to the mat of trampled, whitened reeds. Gusts of warm wind rattled and hissed in the rushes around them. Hidden like this, they spent a few days together hacking up their lungs and giggling as if dizziness and burnt mucous membranes were the funniest things ever. Well, all right, Lily giggled, and Sev resorted to that snickering thing he did to keep from showing his teeth. Lily never did get around to telling him to pack it in and stop worrying, her dad's teeth were just as yellow and uneven. Black tea and nicotine, what did you expect?
They got the hang of it in the end. Smoking, that is. It only lasted a summer. Oh, be truthful, Evans. Two. Lily grimaces a smile, annoyed by the fact that memories of Snape can make her smile at all.
She picks up the pack of cigs and flounces back onto the sofa, reaching as she does for the dial. It takes her a while of spinning rings and aligning numbers before she finds the station. The future that never happened. That's never going to happen. She doesn't bother to justify to herself why she's surfing around looking for more evidence of depravity. She just does it.
Within seconds she stumbles upon them mid-scene, glaring at each other over a table and two glasses of wine. Evidently, while she and James have been lazing about in the afterlife, Hell froze over: Snape's dining with Harry. Lily lights a cig with a flick of her wand and takes a vicious puff. She blows fumes at the telly, imagining Snape's greasy hair catching fire, just as Harry says, peevishly, "Keep your shirt on, all right? I'm trying to say 'thank you.'"
"Do not bloody thank the man who got me and your dad murdered," Lily huffs at the screen. The inside of her mouth feels harsh and prickly, yellow with smoke.
"If I were to lose my head and start rending my shirt in front of everyone in this room," Snape says, in a dark, quiet voice that she doesn't remember at all, "it would be none of your business. I object to having my emotional state hauled up before the Gryffindor review board and bloody well approved. My appetite's not treacle-proof, Potter. The sentimental antics stop now."
"Oh, come down off your broomstick," Harry scoffs. ("Tell him where he can stick it, love," says Lily.) "Sentimental, my foot. How is thanking you suddenly as bad as pulling a Lockhart?"
"Because it's pandering. Little more than a performance tailored to the fantasies of your besotted audience." Snape's eyes narrow sideways, and his disdain snaps out like a lash. "I don't recall agreeing to public humiliation as the price of dinner. Certainly not to boost your reputation as a magnanimous prat." His eyebrow rises to poise over the next part. "At least, not for the price of dinner alone."
"You insufferable git," Lily blurts, astonished. "You should grovel for the chance to kiss his feet." She drops her face in her hands, then, the cigarette almost setting her hair on fire. "I mean, not kiss. I forbid there to be kissing between you and any part of Harry's body. Just grovel, for God's sake."
Merlin, she's babbling, she can tell, but haranguing Severus has always been second nature.
The celestial camera dollies back to show the two men – the man and the boy, Lily thinks stubbornly – seated in a private alcove in a restaurant packed to the rafters with rubbernecking wizards. If glares were arrowheads, Snape would be spreadeagled on the seat cushions by now, bristling with quills like some overdressed St. Sebastian. By contrast, the glances the hungry crowd keeps sneaking at Harry run the gamut from shrewd surmise to starry-eyed adoration.
"How can I display something I don't even know how to pronounce?" Harry points out. Lily's hopes that he'll best Severus in a contest of maturity are dashed when he stoops to mimicking Snape's voice. "Magnanimous." Harry's own voice isn't nearly as deep, and his snort is a tactical error. "Wouldn't hurt you to try it sometime."
Their food arrives, and Snape picks up his wine glass, not to drink but to have something to glare down into. Harry slouches back and sulks unbecomingly at the plate steaming on the table before him. The house elf who does the honours adds to the juvenile atmosphere by trying to decorticate Snape with his scowl.
Lily rolls her eyes. Honestly.
"If conversation's all you wanted, why on earth arrange to put us on display like this?" Snape grumbles, toying with his food.
Harry sets down his fork and stares. "Oh, I like that! You total hypocrite. I invited you to Grimmauld Place for dinner, and the owl returned my letter absolutely covered in red ink!"
Snape's lips twitch. He's still staring down at his plate, but Lily's appalled, thinking, Severus was flirting and Harry didn't even notice. On the one hand, she's relieved that Harry's so clueless about the way Snape's mind works – serious rejection on his part would range from furious, impenetrable silence to the letter coming back as a modified howler that promptly bursts into flames – but the idea that Severus was actually – that Snape, she corrects herself, was teasing Harry alarms her.
"Forgive me, but the idea of joining Messers Weasley, Weasley, Weasley, Madame Weasley, and Mademoiselles Weasley, Granger, and Lovegood in an intimate dinner for nine – "
"Ten, actually." Harry shrugs, sheepish. "I invited Professor McGonagall on kind of short notice. Mrs. Weasley said it wouldn't do to have an odd number of guests. Otherwise you – I mean, someone would get stuck without a dinner partner."
"Yes, boorish of me, how could I have been so shortsighted, I who have never lacked for dinner partners," Snape murmurs, and Lily can't help it, she snorts a laugh. "I trust you were able to cope with uneven numbers in spite of my failure to turn up. But if you make an effort, Potter, and strain your intellectual capacity to the utmost, you might conceivably understand that I'd rather swallow pure aconite than be forced to endure interrogation from one entire half of the Weasley clan. Especially since they have Miss Granger to lead the charge. I'm sick to death of being grilled. Every Auror under the sun has taken a shot at dissecting my memories. So, thank you but no. That way nausea lies.
"There is also the issue," Snape passes a hand down his face, and the weariness he's trying to massage away merely collects like melted wax in the hollows and creases of his skin, "of my esteemed former colleague Minerva McGonagall, who has every right and reason to want to hex the living daylights out of me."
"Oh," Harry says, and stabs his fork into his potato mash. "Yeah, I can see that. But what else did you expect me to do, considering that you'd never agree to come to dinner if it was just me – "
"Oh, of course not, Potter," Snape cuts him off, craning forward at an indignant angle. "Because I am clearly not sitting here consorting with you in the flesh –"
Harry looks up, startled, into Snape's offended snarl. In that half-second's hesitation Lily's off the sofa and on her knees before the console, hand outstretched to freeze the picture. She swears the rings spin and click of their own accord, hitting pause. Because in that half-second Snape's control slips, and Harry's open-mouthed stare is utterly naked. The screen magically frames the way their damaged halves lock into a complex whole. Something fuses between them, a separate entity sparking with emotion.
Hand splayed on the glass, Lily studies the scene. Snape's face, half-hidden behind a greasy drape of coal-black hair, is like the cutting edge of an axe, whetted and seasoned to bite into the sweet block of wood sitting opposite him; to savour that first pungent blow. He's leaning over the table, one wrist bent inward with unconscious elegance, keeping his sleeve well away from the wine sauce on his plate. Paintings adorn the wall above their heads, and the booth is woven with vines to resemble a bower, smooth art-nouveau foliage and dark green leaves. Their travel robes hang from convenient branches.
Harry looks as if someone's just seized him by the back of the neck, shaken him soundly, and set him down again, his lips pursed in a funny little moue and his hair scruffed upright.
Their physical awareness of each other is the third presence at the table, a condensed light defined by the lineaments of their bodies, pressed into the negative space between them.
Lily knows what it is that shares their booth: the avenging angel of mutual desire. It has descended upon them in full view of the crowd, and there's no way they – no way she – can pretend it's not there.
Her faith in the ginger-haired witch and Harry's three children feels distinctly shaken.
Swallowing, Lily smoothes her hand over Harry's messy head, the glass squeaking under her palm. She takes a last drag off her smoke, then traces an arc across the screen and with a savagery she seldom admits to, stubs the cigarette out against Snape's thin cheek. "He can't have you." Her voice sounds scorched to her ears, and she twigs a moment too late to the likelihood that someone who didn't know better would infer she was jealous of the wrong man. Doubt twists in her stomach, but she fends it off, fingers nimble on the dial, hurrying to release her son from this incandescence of lust.
Behind her, a knock ricochets through the room. Blast. Someone's at the door.
She ignores it. The dial chimes faintly like a tapped cymbal. Harry blurs into motion onscreen, "Then why the fuck did you – " and Snape's wrist quickly tips the other way, his forearm slamming down like the span of a drawbridge being lowered. The bridge becomes more than a figure of speech when his fingers slot into the spaces between Harry's knuckles, sliding forward to hold him still. Caress or restraint? Lily can't tell, and she'd bet a clutch of Ashwinder eggs that Harry can't, either. Their hands form a knot on the table, momentarily bridging their differences. Snape remains inscrutable, his silence freezing Harry in his seat like a wordless Imperio. Lily doesn't know what passes between them, but Harry's almost shaking and Snape's the one who grounds them both, providing an outlet in the crush of their hands.
"For Merlin's sake, Potter," he says at last. "Not here."
Breathing erratically, Lily licks her lips and scrubs the ugly black smudge of ash off the picture tube with her sleeve. Oh Merlin, she doesn't like this. She really doesn't like this. Is it the beat of the angel's wings driving the insanity through their veins? Snape's not capable of anything but erotic obsession, last time she checked. Which makes Harry a sitting Kneazle. Maybe evil can't destroy him, but something masquerading as love could.
Then Harry lowers his voice and whispers, "Why the fuck did you kiss me if you didn't want – if you were just going to – "
The knock comes again, and Lily jumps. Damn it.
"I didn't kiss you," Snape hisses, abandoning Harry's hand to snatch up his goblet. This time he drinks, but his hooded eyes stay fixed speculatively on Harry's face.
"I – you're joking – you – " Harry masters himself, makes a "gah!" sound, and quickly knocks back some wine under the shadow of Snape's mocking eyebrow. "You are such a bastard."
Lily couldn't agree more.
"It's my birthright," Snape says coolly. "As an only child, I inherited every bit of bastardliness my parents put into joint savings. One might say I own the bank. Now," he demonstrates for Harry's benefit, "keep your voice down. I only meant that you, if memory serves, were the one who kissed me."
"Right, because you had your knee between my legs!" Harry hollers back in a scathing whisper. "You were the one pinning me to the wall!"
"Self-defence," Snape mutters. "I wasn't waving my wand around like a homicidal drunkard, now, was I? In fact, I was unarmed. In custody. From my perspective, I was merely subduing an overwrought and uninvited guest."
Lily scowls at him. A kiss, was it? That's how it started. Right. She needs to find it.
"Pardon me, Lily, but do you have a moment?" a benevolent voice booms through the door, and she whirls around on her knees, gasping. Albus. Crap. "Forgive me for dropping by unannounced," his Sonorus decreases a bit, and instead of shaking the room it merely echoes. "But I've brought Tom with me."
The baby. Oh, God. Albus. The baby. She'd totally forgotten. "Just a minute!" Lily calls. "I need to – just give me a minute, I'll be – "
"So why'd you kiss back?"
Speechless, Lily swivels around to stare. Oh, Harry.
"Because I'm a pathologically self-destructive seducer of little boys," Snape says, his delivery so deadpan that she can't tell whether he's joking or not. The camera zooms in to consider this flash of honesty. For all that he seems to be leading Harry by the nose through this absurd convo, Snape's face is almost regal in its refusal to betray emotion. The picture focuses without comment on his hand gripping the table edge, the fine bones overrun with distended veins. "Don't tell me you haven't viewed the memories I so cunningly bled out in my delusion that I was finally getting off at the last stop on the Night Bus."
What memories? Lily recalls Harry pouring a flask of them over Snape's grave. Flustered, she pokes the dead butt she's been smoking into the packet of filter tips, and jams it in her pocket. Then she sweeps her wand around the room, dispelling the stink of smoke.
"Look," Harry says. His hand inches across the table until his fingers are quivering in proximity to Snape's, just the barest few molecules of skin touching skin. The telly gives her a close-up, then pans to Harry's face. He looks adorably earnest. "I liked kissing you. You presumably liked kissing me, even if you refuse to admit it. My guess is that we don't have to like each other to like kissing."
"Oh Jesus God," Lily says, stopping dead to stare.
Snape makes haste to cover his mouth, and Lily want to slap him for the disbelieving smirk he's hiding from Harry. "I do believe that's the most Slytherin thing you've ever said to me, Potter," he murmurs in that silky, forbidding voice. Frustrated, she drops down in front of the console to search his worn face for the boy she once knew. The boy who used to love her. Having smoothed away his smile with thumb and forefinger, Snape draws his wand – Lily can just imagine how everyone in the room flinches – to cast warming and stasis charms on their untouched plates. "If you mean what you say, then why not ask this fine establishment to deliver our meal to – ah, my mistake. Still unplottable, is it?"
Harry takes off his glasses. "What? Oh. Er – not anymore." He has trouble getting the words out. Buffing the lenses absently against his shirt, he squints at Snape, as if unsure exactly who it is sitting across from him.
"The Order broke Fidelius? What stupid twat – " Snape sputters, then inhales the rest of the sentence and looks away.
Lily wonders if the war will ever be over for him; if he will ever stop analyzing each new situation for probability factors of betrayal and death. Serves him right. The least he can do is live out the rest of his years in a state of miserable paranoia.
"Never mind. It doesn't matter. This is the sort of stupidity that makes life interesting, I suppose." He stares at Harry some more and presses the serviette to his thin lips. "Well, then, shall we? You'll have to summon the waiter, as I have the distinct impression that I'm a social nonentity here. Unless I've already called your bluff?"
Behind her, an infant starts to wail. The latch clicks, and she leaps to her feet as Albus strolls in, jiggling the bundle in his arms. "Apologies, my dear, but he's grizzling like mad."
On the tube, Harry's arm strains out of its socket as if he's flagging down a cab or lobbying for a teacher's attention. "Check, please!" squeaks his miniature voice. It's a tinny, old-speaker-wire sound, and Snape, she notices with immense relief, has been shunted offscreen by the camera angle.
Hands unsteady, she spins the rings before turning off the set. Covering your tracks, she tells herself scornfully. As if Albus doesn't already know.
"Come in," she says, breathless, because he is in. "Sorry I kept you waiting. Would you like to sit down?"
"Please don't trouble yourself," Albus tuts. "I know how it is. One minute, and then one minute more. It's quite addicting, watching the lives we left behind. Don't you agree?"
When he beams and offers her the blanketed lump, she takes the peevish infant and just stands there, wondering how to entertain Albus. She's holding the baby as if he's a bread loaf, because she can't quite bring herself put her arms around him.
"I must be off," Albus remarks, making no move to go. "Discoveries hang in the balance. Do you know, with Gellert's help I've already found three new uses for dragon's blood, thus bringing it to a grand total of fifteen."
Smiling, he contemplates the floor, then crooks his finger. The gold dial leaps directly to his hand. Lily feels a thread of guilt stitch through her pulse, but she ignores it.
"We're having a little trouble with the last one," Albus confides, spinning the rings almost absent-mindedly. "It's not ideal, trying to reproduce experimental conditions here in the afterlife. No corporeal substance, you understand." The dial hums and clicks. "It's a pity all our work is doomed to remain purely theoretical."
He still shows no sign of budging. Albus never leaves when he says he will. "What's the problem?" Lily sighs, willing him to stop channel-hopping.
"Ah, well, the obvious problem is that we have no way of testing it." Albus cocks his head when a loud hiss bursts from the speakers. The blurry picture starts to flip hypnotically, bottom to top, like the blades of a windshield wiper. "Put bluntly, our only test subject is someone who should never be allowed to imbibe it."
He turns and points his crooked nose at the bundle of baby Dark Lord she's holding. Alarmed, Lily draws the child closer, as if to protect him from the experimental urges of two mad scientists.
"You've lost me," she says.
"My fault, I'm afraid, for being so obscure." Having piqued her interest, Albus smiles. "We believe – we'd like to think – that we've created an elixir, which may have the power to 'stopper death.' That's Severus's phrase. Rather poetic, wouldn't you say? It's not foolproof, by any means. And it's not immortality, no, nothing like. It merely assists, if the soul desires, in holding off the body's demise."
Lily frowns down at Tom and swallows. "I see." She thinks it foolish of Albus to allude to this within earshot of Voldemort's soul. Then she makes the connection, and her nerves light up. "Oh – could Harry, do you think – "
"I do indeed. Think, that is." Albus silences her with a shake of his head, although his smile is kind. "We cannot test it, alas. And I have no wish to poison our Chosen One."
A sharp rap on the door breaks in on their exchange of secrets. "Dumbledore! By Medusa's head, I could have swum three laps around the lake by now! If you could never be punctual in life, at least take pity on your friends in death!"
"Patience, Gellert," Albus calls. "I'll be with you in a – "
"Patience be damned! I would prefer punctuality!" Gellert roars back.
Brows lifting in amusement, Albus peers at the screen and sets the dial down on the console. It tips toward Lily, the number thirteen winking on its surface. "I've tuned in," Albus remarks over his shoulder as he makes his unhurried way to the door, "to what's happening now in the land of the living. At this very moment. If you can spare the time, I believe you'll find it rather enlightening."
The door bumps shut; the tongue of the latch clicks. Deflating, Lily folds onto the sofa.
She stands up a second later to fetch the golden ball and then sits again, the baby warm and awkward in her arms, almost weightless. He squirms. She notices a fine sheen of perspiration on his blistered cheeks, so she tugs the blanket off his head. He's bald, poor chap. She's tempted to cover him up again but decides he could stand some airing out.
For a while she simply sprawls back on the sofa and broods. Nothing's happening on the telly. The picture's dim, and all she can see are trees. She tries to oust from her mind that flash of helpless desire she'd seen beating its wings between Snape and her son. The memory won't go. She hears Harry say again, We don't have to like each other to like kissing. For the love of Merlin. Good thing it'll never happen or they'd eat each other alive. Restless, Lily rolls her head toward the curtained window, feeling the allure of sun and wind. She thinks seriously of hailing James to come meet the baby, then glances down at Tom and thinks better of it.
Something pale and glowing appears onscreen and slips through the underbrush, alerting her. A unicorn, perhaps, gliding along a path in the Forbidden Forest, doing whatever it is unicorns do when free of those pesky virgins. Lily smiles faintly. What could possibly be enlightening about this?
Wafting upward, the creature lands in a clearing. It whispers to a stop, its milky hide as brilliant as the crusted snow that etches the rocks into crystal sculptures. Translucent ears prick forward. With a soundless cry, Lily gathers Tom to her breast and slides off the sofa. She scoots closer to the screen and leans forward, rapt, cradling the baby in the sling of her knees.
Head swivelling to look back, the doe stamps her hoof, then snorts softly. She bounds forward to merge with the shadows. A ghostly and beautiful light bursts from her, stippling the surrounding trees. Snow diamonds glitter in the low-lying boughs. Cut-glass stars flare atop fir trees.
In her wake, a deeper shadow ripples along the inky treeline. It's silent and ominous, sinuously black. Only an occasional cloud in the frosty air betrays that it lives and breathes. Footprints stamp pockets in the snow, but each telltale mark magically fills and disappears.
For several yards the forest wall thins out. Tree shadows stripe the snow like piano keys, ivory alternating with black. The figure hesitates, then flows over the intervals, brushing silent chords with the hem of his robe. Lily hears the squeaky crunch of boots on snow. Moonlight freezes on his skin, his face flickering from visible to invisible like the stuttering frames of a silent film.
Her chest aches. Snape. Bloody Snape. What's he doing with her Patronus?
She watches the whole thing, fingertips pressed to her mouth. Tom dozes. The silver doe wafts serenely up to a small tent buried in the forest – hiding, that's right, Harry and his friends are hiding from the Dark Lord. The light the doe's made of lures forth – oh God. An overwhelming rush of love tingles through her. There he is. Lily smiles, and it hurts her face. She yearns to embrace the scruffy, bruised-looking young man who emerges from under the tent flaps. Her baby. Her grown son. Instead, she draws the blanket over Tom's face so there's no chance he can see or somehow betray the boy who matters most. She assumes that Voldemort knows nothing of what happens here, on this side of the veil, but why risk it?
She drinks in the sight of Harry, almost forgetting in her fear and joy the third member of this little charade. Then the doe moves off, blazing, through the crowded darkness, and Harry stumbles in pursuit.
Snape gives them a decent lead, blending with the background like a charred tree trunk. Then he breaks his stillness, steps forth under the moon, and Disapparates.
This is happening now. Lily watches, shivering, her heart in her mouth. She watches the entire scene in real time, the lake, the sword, Harry shucking his clothes and descending into the frigid water, a tall young man appearing in the nick of time to wade in after him and haul him ashore. She looks at Harry, loves him, and cannot save him. Not even from his own foolishness, damn it.
Her heart is so full that she can't help herself; she uncovers the baby and leans forward to plant a soft kiss on his hot, skinned brow. He doesn't wake up, which is for the best.
Shifting her arse, because she's been sitting in one position for a very long time, she resets the dial and watches it again.
Because there's this little matter of Severus Snape's role in this strange escapade. He's there the entire time, lurking in the darkness beneath a massive, snow-laden tree. The lake gleams nearby like a bottomless hole with a pale glaze upon it. Snape keeps watch, almost indistinguishable from the black-iron whorls of the tree trunk. The doe ripples into view, waves of radiance building and breaking in scattered bursts upon the black-velvet landscape. Shortly thereafter, Harry scrambles out of the underbrush and the Patronus vanishes in a dazzle of light.
Layers of darkness reclaim the forest, blurry and impenetrable, gradually yielding to snowlight, the soft sound of Harry's panting, and the tiny, ghostly clouds that mark each breath. In another second, Lily discerns his silhouette detaching from the background, moving about. But it's Snape she watches, Snape with his arms folded and his shoulders hunched.
Snape, in turn, watches Harry. With his eyes, of course, but in a larger sense with his entire body. Lily re-winds and starts again once she realizes how whole-souled Snape's focus is. He's attuned to everything Harry does, every small infraction, every failure to be careful, his bewilderment and inexperience. Each incautious tread and red-nosed sniffle, each cough and flash of lens and iridescent sheen of magic that emanates from the boy, Severus witnesses and absorbs into himself. He huddles against the tree, as silent as the snow upon the ground, but his entire being is bent upon Harry.
He never steps forward, and only twice reacts in any overt way. The first time, when Harry strips naked to enter the lake. Lily sees Snape's eyes enlarge in his white face, and the quality of his watching intensifies by several magnitudes. The second time, when Harry flails deeper into the freezing water and the surface smoothes over and goes mirror-still. When he doesn't emerge, Snape snaps to attention. Sparks cascade from his wand as it whips into the air. He starts to cast, but a splintering sound interrupts him, the crunching of ice-bound twigs as the Weasley boy crashes out of the trees and plunges into the lake to save his friend.
Snape lowers the wand, and an unvoiced spectre curls from his lips, an exhaled prayer of relief. When the boys thrash ashore, Harry coughing up water and convulsing from the bone-deep chill, the two of them dragging the magnificent sword between them, Snape shifts his feet and refolds his arms, breathing deeply. Lily has no doubt that he's repressing the desire to go wrap his winter robes around that goosefleshed body, Harry's bare skin pearly and dripping icewater in the soft Lumos.
Snape witnesses the destruction of the locket. He stays even after Ron helps Harry pull on his knitted layers and limp back to camp. Once the silence and the darkness have settled again, and Lily can hear the ice creak and the report of a frozen branch like a gunshot in the distance, he focuses on the place where Harry struggled out of his shabby clothes and extends one black-sleeved arm.
"Expecto Patronum."
The doe forms shimmering at the end of his wand, and the lake turns molten silver. This is dangerous. Snape seems driven by something he can't control, now that it's only himself at stake.
Brilliant and unearthly, the Patronus soars into the air and twists back on itself, touching down again directly in front of him.
Snape holds utterly still, bathed in the luminous magic of remembered happiness.
Lily wonders how it feels; if it's like immersing one's existence in a gigantic pensieve. He doesn't turn silver like the overhanging cypress. If anything, his contrasts grow more pronounced, his hair and clothes a deeper black, the pallor of his skin so pure, so identifiably him in shape and angle, that it's like a spiritual portrait. His eyes are dense, hot, the air in front of them warped as if by a heat mirage. Shafts of light strike their black surfaces and refract below. When he blinks, colours fly out in minuscule, vanishing sparks.
The glow dims, condenses, and Snape darkens into near-silhouette, his face eerie with reflected magic. His eyes squeeze shut, and Lily's alarmed that Severus Snape - spy, Dark wizard, Death Eater, tongue-lasher of negligent fools - would drop his guard so completely. The doe arches her neck. She's like the scratch of light from a shooting star, caught in recognizable shape. The outline of her muzzle brushes Snape's cheek. She licks once, twice, her tongue a passing glitter, like tinsel on his skin. His face tilts, as if raised for a kiss or a blessing.
The doe vanishes, snuffed out of existence like a candle flame.
Snape jerks, pulled out of memory and plunged back into winter. Darkness flows over him, the darkness of the present moment. He gathers himself. It's mesmerising, like watching the black and white shadows of two decades race over him, fast-forwarding from youth into age, from hope to despair. Lily sees him gather his anger, his stubbornness, his cold brilliance and remorse, his bitter devotion, sees him spin them around himself and pull the net tight. The lines eat into his face as he grows spidery again, fugitive, too subtle for even the Dark Lord to catch.
The night wind whistles through the naked branches, drags a handful of hair across his eyes. Eyeless, he's terrifying. Then he turns toward the wind and it rakes the blindfold away, revealing his grim face. The quiet pop of Apparition overlaps the sharp tinkle as icicles break off and crash into the snow.
Lily clicks the dial. Thoughtfully, she rests her cheek against Tom's frail skull. So Severus has a heart. She can't think of anyone, save Dumbledore, perhaps, who wouldn't laugh or sneer at this revelation. It's the sort of knowledge one keeps to oneself. She will never forget the way he watched Harry, just as she will never forget that Harry will someday lick Severus's face with the same reverence the doe showed him that night.
That is, Harry would. If his future weren't already spoken for.