XXXVII

His very heart had been burning; it was fire on coal, hot and provocative. If Severus had wanted to admit it, he would have said that he was scared out of his wits for what was about to come. What mere words could possibly convey the atrocity that he had committed? Telling Lily—telling Lily about this was ludicrous, rash, and imprudent. An impromptu speech would have to be made, that was certain. He couldn't find the sane words to convey to her. His entire vocabulary had slipped away from him as soon as he thought of what tale he would tell.

Submissively, he shoved the key into the door recklessly, and turned the knob ever so carefully and slowly. One deep breathe, two, three, fourteen—'Don't hyperventilate!' The door creaked open; tears were already staining his eyes. He gripped his left forearm, grasped it with unfavorable malice. Oh how deplorable the pitiable marionette felt not. In scorning languish, he stood at the threshold. A fantasy passed through his head, one that would never happen: Lily was in his arms, in a white dress made of a silken fabric. There she was in his arms, and hers were around his neck. He stepped across the threshold. A new life began. Standing at this abominable catastrophe, his life had been brought to an end. Everything he had worked so hard for, everything he had begun to love, all of it gone, faster than the time it takes to fall asleep, faster than the time it takes to die. He was alive, yes, but could it really be called 'life' when he felt as if he were rotting from the inside out, perishing and turning into cremation as he let time just stroll by?

Hearing his sniveling whimpers, Lily walked into to the doorway. She saw how horrid he looked. His face was gaunt, and his eyes seemed to be dead, void of the beauteous life they once valiantly held. She whimpered out his name, breaking down with him. A sharp pain in his chest inflicted him. Never had she looked more beautiful than at that moment, wearing a shimmering white nightgown, her wavy hair scattered every which way, her eyes glowing in the dead of night. She flushed for a moment, before he noticed the tears falling gracefully from her porcelain, china doll face. "Severus?" Lily could not believe that it was him standing at the doorway so disheveled and corpse-like.

Before they knew it, they were on their knees holding each other like one was a life saver and the other the oxygen needed to survive. If this was the last time he would see her, he swore that he would have her, have her as long as he could, as long as the world would let him. He captured her lips one last time, savoring the taste of her. She kissed back frivolously. They grabbed at each other, his hands rubbing the small of her back, and it dared to reach lower and grasp supple, voluptuous areas of her perfection. And she did her best not to drown in him, not to stop breathing in the midst of their kisses. His fingertips were caressing her, carving arduous poems into her. They had to separate; she put her head on his chest, inhaling his scent. Never had he smelled this strong, this full of iron and malice and innumerable things. But there was also the scent of his old self, fading slowly, and fading for the kindling to the fire was burning smaller.

Her facial features began to distort as she realized that something terrible had occurred—something that she had never wanted to happen. But she couldn't help but hope that some other unspeakable something had happened. "Please tell me that you were run over, that you were taken by centaurs. Tell me that you were out for a stroll in the dead of the night and were captured by a band of reckless, teenage wizards. Tell me that you fell into the sea and swam back just to find me. Speak to me of the tale where you jumped into a fairytale land and you were eaten by a dragon and spit back out into this world." She was hitting him across the chest as she spoke, her voice gravelly and unforgiving, but also full of seething wishes and derisive dreams. "Lie to me about how you were in search of the perfect emerald so it would match the color of my eyes. Twist your tongue when you tell me how you stepped into a fire, because it reminded you so much of my hair. Tell me that you fell into a coal mine because you were lost and desperately searching for me in the delusions that you thought were reality. Tell me Severus, God damn-it—tell me that you weren't immersing yourself in all out hell! Continue lying; just don't tell me the truth. Tell me how you were kidnapped by a murderer and fought for your life just so you could see me one last time. Tell me that you were good, and that you didn't betray me. Tell me that there isn't that mark on your skin. Please, please tell me that you aren't with them."

He kissed her sensuously one more time, because he had to do it. He was possessed by the devil, and he needed her to be possessed with him. She roughly pulled away from him after she had so willingly melted into those warm kisses of his. She tried to convince herself that she had felt nothing, nothing except acerbity and disgust, but no matter what she did, all she could feel was warmth tingling through her so defiantly. "Call me a Mudblood. Just say it Snape. Say it like you had in fifth year so we could sever this here and now. Show me what you have on your arm so I can walk away." She ripped off his cloak furiously, leaving it in pieces on the floor around them. She looked at the mark and froze. Her face drained of color. Severus' heart attempted to jump out of his chest, only to ricochet back in and shatter into innumerable, jagged pieces which proceeded to cut his chest cavity. "Shite! You—you filthy lair! You told me you wouldn't. You promised you weren't with going to be a part of the Death Eaters. I can't trust a dodgy Slytherin. 'Don't give him another chance, Lily' they said. 'He called you a Mudblood once Lily, he'll kill you the next time,' they told me. I trusted you! I trusted you Snape!"

Lily couldn't stand, she couldn't leave even if she wanted to. Overtaken by lithe, she began to pound her fists into his chest unrestrainedly. Even when she felt an arrhythmia in his chest, she did not cease fire. Her teeth were barred, her eyes aflame. She was gorgeously frightening. Severus could do nothing to stop her, for he knew he deserved every hit that came to him. The attack slowed down until her fists dropped to her sides, still clenched, but now bruised and clotted with vermillion blood. She looked to the floor, trying not to picture who they once were as the innocent children on Spinner's End, playing by the polluted lake, making fun of the daft bints that walked home tipsy. She was brushing the images of him laughing with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks away from the face of her mind to no avail. "Why, Sev, why? Where did you go?" She slumped onto the floor, and he followed almost instantly.

He pulled her to him. She was too weak to push away from him. Some outer force had glued Lily to Severus, and helplessly she was unyielding. Her sobs and shrieks could be heard as the Death Eaters began to raid the village. But they were soon suppressed and disguised by other's cries, which blended in with hers and formed into a funeral march.

"I'm so sorry Lily."

"Apologies won't change what you did."

"Neither can you, Lily. You can't change me." He wanted to be able to look away from her, to tell himself that there was something else out there for him, but he knew his one and only was in his arms right now, and that she would be gone as soon as she stopped battling with herself.

"That's why I left you during fifth year. That's why I escaped our hell, Snape. You aren't the Sev I knew all those years ago. You're—you're just as bad as they all are."

"I don't need you tell me that, Lily."

"Don't use my name."

But he said her name anyway. He kept repeating it like a record with only one track. Then, she kissed him wildly, insanely. She poured whatever love she could into him, in hopes that it would empty her of the feelings she had left for him, though she did so without reward. All she was left with was the tortured feeling of infinity. Both their lips were bruised and bluing, but neither cared. They were sinking on a ship, and they would go down together if they had to. He bit her lip, and their tongues mingled once more.

"Tell me you hate me." Lily scathed.

"I love you," he breathed into her. "I love you more than the moon loves the night sky."

She pressed closer into him. "Do you love me enough to say goodbye?" She took his wand out of his boot, and jabbed it into his neck, her eyes bidding him adieu. "Do you love me enough to close your eyes?"

He pressed his eyes shut; closing them with such force that he was sure he would be blind if he chose to open them. He grimaced. "Do it: Kill me now to save us both the agony." He heard the echoes of her dropping his wand on the floor, or did she throw it? Her hand found its place on his chilly shoulder. Once more were their lips in each other's devastating company. Both were cracked and bleeding, but they ignored the iron flavoring, for the poignant joining was too much on its own.

Both knew that if they parted now, it would be to no avail. Just like waves keep crashing on a beach, their lips would keep crashing against each other, until they were nonexistent. They would have rather eaten each other alive than separated.

This was the first time that both felt that they needed each other to survive. It was not a cathartic need, nor an uncouth need. It was a mutual need for mental, physical and emotional sanity. It was the type of need that two people could share only when they had become one, when they functioned as one being. Lily poured her love into Severus, as Severus had poured his love into her. When he needily grabbed at her waste, she would respond by shoving her hands into his velvety atramentous hair, savoring it's feeling against her soft fingertips, and wanting nothing more than that same feeling to never leave them.

"I love you," he uttered once more.

"I loved who you were."

"If I told you that I was always the same person, would you believe me?"

"I wouldn't deny it."

"Will you leave?"

"When the morning comes," she promised him, but she also promised it to herself. She couldn't live on like this, live with a cloud on the overhang of her head.

He looked into her dreadfully beautiful eyes, and she looked into his fiery, revealing vortexes of ebony. "I'm doing this for you Lily; I'm doing all of this for you."

"I never wanted any of this Severus, I only wanted you." She was smiling, smiling out of the memory of them, of what was once the most beautifully unmarred thing she had known.

"Do you regret it Lily?"

She shook her head from side to side, "No, never. Do you?"

"How could I?"

Neither wanted too moved from the aged, pealing parquet. "They're attacking out there," he told her.

"I know. Are you supposed to be out there?"

"Yes, but I would rather die here with you. It's the only way I could die happily."

Tears formed in hear dry eyes once more. "Why do you act so evilly when you have such a warm, good heart?"

"That is only between one other person and I."

"I'll be fighting on the other side. I might have to kill you when the time comes."

"I would never stop you from it if you had to."

"Would you have to kill me Severus?"

"I would rather take the Dementor's Kiss."

"Isn't it ironic how life ends up?"

"No, it is just pitiful and depressing."

He stood up, and took Lily's hand. They sauntered to the window. Looking down below them they could see the entire village on fire. Bodies of blood and rags were stacked in piles on the floor. Severus held Lily when she tried to run and jump for the window.

"Is it wrong for me to still love you?" She asked him, because every sinew within her screaming body was telling her so raucously and flamboyantly that this was the rightest thing she had ever felt.

"Only if it's a sin for me to love you as much as I do, Lily." She had put her head on his chest and calculated formulas for ways that she could still be with him. 'Why not?' she had asked herself, 'there are people like us across the pages of ineffable history. Why can't we be together?' When she closed her eyes the only answer she came up with was the absence of one.

Yet there was one fragment standing clear: Loving one another would lead to heartbreak, which would lead to hatred, which would result in a discretion so enigmatic that neither would be whole once more. It was what had happened to Severus the first time, though Lily had absolutely no awareness of it. She sighed into him, still calculating the ways they could be together, and still imagining the magnificent dream of being round with his child, and walking down an aisle in a room of white filled with orange carnations.

Out in the hallway, Regulus had come to get Severus. Severus had told him through of series of owl sent letters of what he would do. Regulus and he formed a plan. On the night that Severus told Lily, Regulus would come into their room to see if Severus was still there, lying on the floor incapacitated by his broken heart and soul. He smiled happily as he witnessed the two holding each other so lovingly.

"They're coming in this area next, Severus. Be out of here in fifteen minutes," sounded Regulus who left with his cloaks billowing behind him in to the rest of the inn and out the door to help the effort.

Lily looked at him, gaping in bewilderment. "You came here to save me."

"That I did, Lily."

"You risked your life." Her eyes were wide and shimmering with (she would have denied it then) joy. "You risked your life for me."

"What don't you understand about the words 'I love you'? Do you want me to spell it out in rose petals as I shower you with chocolate and puppies?" he said sardonically.

Lily laughed whilst wiping away her tears. "This is surreal."

"Wake up; this isn't a dream or a nightmare. Reality is the best nightmare that could ever be produced."

"We have to leave, Severus."

He nodded. Heading to the kitchen where Lily had thrown his wand, he went to pick it up. As he bent over, he felt Lily fall over from him. The supports of the building were collapsing. Both could smell smoke coming from the first floor. They spent too much time in there. Severus and Lily tumbled to the stove: He shielded her from the impact, making sure that she would land on his torso. His wand was firmly in his hand, but his magic wasn't working for him. The Death Eaters had already set up a charm on the building which suppressed magic. She looked up at Severus, her face asking him what to do. "We're screwed," his eyes told her. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. A low rumble sounded from the belly of the small building. Saffron colored bricks were falling from the sides of the building on the outside, and the chimney had already collapsed, the ashes within it scattering across the black charred ground.

The Death Eater's outside were running, their tongues sticking out and screams of victory reverberating through the ruins of what once was the most beautiful village for kilometers. Dumbledore was nowhere to be found, nor was the Order. Despair rang through the village and onto the hills. Animals were dropping dead kilometers away for they could not bear to sense that dejection permeating just kilometers away from them. The grass which was once green and blew with the wind in a cheerful dance was charred and falling apart. The surrounding forest was veiled in a thick puff of black smoke. Rivers of water turned into rivers of carmine blood. The moon seemed to be falling from the sky, and the beings who were alive felt as if the sun would never rise.

Bellatrix was the one who had done the dead, her black, curly hair whipping wildly with the wind. She cast Fiendfyre, and the entire village was consumed within a second. The Death Eaters that could have ran away; ran like cowardly rabbit.

"I love you," Lily told Severus. She wanted those three words you be her dying ones.

"I love you too."

They kissed as the building fell. The shrapnel dug into their skin, making Lily shriek against his warm, palpable lips, not because of the pain she felt, but because of the horror of watching Severus' body become mutilated and raw. Severus was shielding Lily as best as he could, hoping that if he suffered enough, she would make it out alive. The last support fell and so did their entire room. Severus flipped in mid-air and landed first on the ground first. Lily landed on top of him, her lips still pasted to his. She heard his bones break, and she opened her mouth to shriek, but she could not. His eyes rolled back, and she knew he had stopped breathing. Lily, with every iota of might left within her, moved the locks of liquid ink away from his unblemished, sleeping face. She pressed her lips to his forehead, for she couldn't handle the prospect of feeling his cold lips on hers. She got up, looking at her deceased lover. She couldn't take the pain anymore: She looked away, and then walked away from the wreckage. She would come back later to retrieve him, she promised herself. She couldn't just leave him here. Words could not feasibly describe the tragedy toiling within her emotionally marred person. Lily felt molested and used, but also alone and terrified without him by her side, with his heart still beating and his face in an infinite scowl.

Severus woke in a jolt. Breathing felt like there was fire smoldering in his lungs and larynx. Lily was no longer on his chest. He sighed in relief, knowing that somewhere out in the world she was safe.

He stood up, knowing that his left leg and arm were already broken. He walked into the ever-burning village, not knowing where he was going, but he knew that he would escape its wrath safely.

In his peripheral vision he saw a blonde man on the ground, choking up blood, and his grey eyes on the verge of closing permanently. "Well, Lucius, you've never looked better."

"I could say the same thing to you, my old friend."

Severus laughed maniacally. "How does it feel to be the one dying?"

"I've felt worse things, Severus."

"Said in the words of a true Gryffindor," sneered Severus jovially, though with a look of bitter contempt.

"I've never despised you more." Lucius rolled onto his back, wincing.

"I've never been gladder to hear it."

Lucius' breath was staggering. "I've been happy to serve." The words exhausted his dying breath. Ruffling through the corpse's clothing, Severus extracted the journal, content with the fact that he had not hidden it yet.

There went history, torn to shreds. Draco Malfoy would never be born. What did Severus face to say to that? 'Good riddance' he thought, 'good riddance to the days of the spoilt brat with a nasally voice and a snooty attitude. Good riddance to another pain in my arse.' The other tolerable half of him knew that a casualty of history had taken place, and that it was only because he had come back in time. Looking at this moment, he no longer recognized his life. Picking up whatever shards of his existence he could, he moved on, looking up at the sky. Could he even call himself Severus Snape anymore?

It was dawn, and like Lily had promised, she was gone. The sky was lavender and orange, but it did not radiate happiness like it should have. It succeeded in reminding Severus of all the times Lily and he and watch the sun rise—it was literally innumerable. Some people saw the dawn as a new beginning. Severus saw it as the end—the end of disaster and his pitiful lurching from indecision to worthless decision.

Before walking away from the village he walked into the fire, because it reminded him of Lily's hair. He would later venture to find the perfect emerald to match her eyes, and would even get captured by centaurs. This was the path of his life and he relished it so. In the fire, he felt Lily, and he smiled. Walking out, he was not burned nor marred by its scalding flames. He walked into the fire, like Lily had so wanted him to do.

A/N: I'm not evil. I may be insane and seemingly heartless, but I am not evil. I was tempted to end it at the page break, but I couldn't. I cried through writing this, so I assume it's normal if you cried to. Review? Favorite? Follow? The story will be ending in ten chapters, or less, or more…I don't know yet. We'll see how it pans out!

-E.S. Grey