(Author Notes revised & updated 2nd September, 2012)
Disclaimer: I am not J K Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.
Note: The following is a one-shot set in an alternate universe. It is identified as 'horror' and rated 'M' just to be on the safe side. It features a major deviation from canon. It takes the form of what is effectively one long internal monologue, featuring the reflections of Lord Voldemort's 'right hand' in this particular universe.
It was the not having the chance to apologise which had pushed her over the edge, she was later to reflect. Severus had been right. She had been wrong. Unfortunately the proving of it had been lethal to Severus, so she never got the chance to say 'sorry'. At the point he'd died she had, let's face it, acquired other friends and acquaintances she valued at least as much as some delinquent practitioner of the dark arts – as her teenage self had viewed him – but he'd been an old friend nonetheless, and damnit he'd been right with his theory about Remus Lupin. And she'd told him outright that he had been wrong, and it had stung, not being able to do the proper thing and apologise, because he was dead; it had hurt her pride. And so the things which she had tried to do instead, to salvage her pride, had become an increasingly rapid trip in one direction.
She liked to think she wasn't so much in freefall these days, as flying.
The first six months had been awful. Given Severus had been right about the silly little thing (if a werewolf could be called that) which had killed him, she'd had to question what else he might have been right about, which she'd pooh-poohed? It had been an uncomfortable trip. She'd had to look at how Potter and his gang were operating, inter-house prejudices, and how the headmaster and his deputy ran the school. She hadn't liked the conclusions which she'd drawn. Severus may have been a bit unbalanced and over the top in some of the things which he'd claimed, but by and large the general direction he'd been going in had been correct.
It was ironic, of course, for her to think of Sev as having been a bit unbalanced, given what she was doing these days. She was the Dark Lord's flame-haired angel – his right hand, who brought destruction to his enemies – which she was pretty sure counted as unbalanced in a lot of people's minds. Especially given she was a muggle-born.
Severus couldn't appreciate the irony though. Severus was dead. Severus had been torn to pieces by a werewolf, courtesy of one Mr. Sirius Black. Dumbledore had done nothing about it. Sirius' family had sent him a letter congratulating him on it.
She didn't particularly care about that now. It was all just so much water under the bridge. Sirius Black's end had been appropriate, both in terms of violence and of helplessness. He'd screamed and begged and pleaded, but to no avail. The only thing which could have saved him would have been his taking the dark mark, but for all Sirius Black's supposed cleverness and cunning he'd apparently been too dumb to figure that out.
She reckoned that Pettigrew or Lupin had been the real brains of the Marauder operation. James and Sirius had just been going along with them for the ride. And after their moment of ugly triumph when Sev died, they had fallen into bickering and broken up.
Lupin, at least, had had the honour to do the decent thing. He'd taken a hefty dose of poison, the day after Severus' funeral. With that quiet sense of humour, he'd selected monkshood, also commonly known as 'aconite' or 'wolf's bane'. Dumbledore had been in full spin by that point, frantically covering things up about Severus' death, and Lupin hadn't actually been in any immediate danger from the Ministry, but Lupin had been worried about things other than his own sorry hide.
He'd left a note, but Dumbledore had destroyed it. Lily had glimpsed it – full of polite regret, and a sense of belated responsibility. If Dumbledore hadn't destroyed that note and had instead passed it on to the investigating aurors, the woman that naïve teenage girl had become sometimes wondered if she would have stepped back from her own course, but he had, and that had outraged her, and given her fresh impetus to take the next steps forward.
She missed Lupin sometimes. He'd been as much a victim in this as anyone. He was a long way short of innocent – he'd had blood on his snout and paws, alright – but he'd been a follower who'd had the misfortune to pick the wrong leaders to hitch his fortunes to, in the shape of James Potter, Sirius Black, and Albus Dumbledore. He was a casualty of war who'd had the misfortune of picking the wrong side, and commanders who pretended they valued him, but in fact viewed him as little more than a pawn and any concern for whom was incidental to that for the impact his presence or removal from the board had on their overall position.
Say what you like about the Dark Lord, but at least he was honest when it came to the value of a servant or ally. If you pleased him he said so. If you were useful he commended you and made clear in exactly what way. And if you screwed up, you paid for it at once, and the matter was then settled.
She didn't screw up. She was far too motivated to mess anything important like a mission from the Dark Lord up. She had an absolutely spotless record of service as far as the Dark Lord was concerned. And the Dark Lord and his servants and allies were winning this war at long last, after a few shaky, difficult, years. When Lily Evans had been recruited, after a brief interview with the Dark Lord himself in which he assured himself of her motivations and intentions (she'd been extensively probed with legilimency to ensure she wasn't a Ministry or Order spy), the Death Eater fortunes were ebbing as the giants crumbled, and even the wand of a muggle-born was grudgingly welcome in the Death Eater ranks. There had been a few unpleasant disciplinary incidents in which the Dark Lord had had to remind some Death Eaters that mudbloods were traitors and enemies, whereas muggle-borns were friends and allies – in much the same sense that there was a difference between blood-traitors and other pure-bloods – and the Dark Lord had pointed out that if anyone wished to convince him otherwise, it was up to him or her to demonstrate that they were more valuable servants.
They couldn't of course. Not the worst of the bigots. But at least in their attempts to outdo her the sense of healthy competition it engendered had helped to stabilise the strategic situation and initiated the long slow process of turning things around.
The Order of the Phoenix feared her these days. They thought that they knew what they were fighting when they faced her, but if they did, they didn't see or actually understand it. They were so alike, members of the Order and her, and yet unlike.
So many of them – so many of the Order – were faux little Gryffindors, slavishly devoted to their wandless headmaster, pretending that doing things that were philosophically 'heroic' made them brave, whilst she was the one who was the true Gryffindor, fighting in a berserker fury. She'd fully expected to die at any moment in her first dozen or so proper fights, but these days she was used to her wrath carrying away any present enemy. Even Bellatrix, who was about as prejudiced a pure-blood in the Death Eater ranks as you could get, whilst actually being competent, conceded she was 'halfway decent in a fight' and like the original wand she'd wielded 'quite good for charms'. She preferred to use the wand she'd taken from Albus Dumbledore these days though. It was a reminder to the opposition of just what they were facing – someone able to incapacitate the great vanquisher of Grindelwald – and it felt unbelievably powerful and good to use it in battle.
Aurors knew they might get mercy from her, since they were servants of the state, and the Dark Lord was interested in the apparatus being as undamaged as possible for his own eventual use, but members of the Order of the Phoenix who saw her just ran – they knew that they were a private army fighting for a philosophy and individual the Dark Lord and she despised, and that she had carte blanche to deal with them as she wished – and the overly wordy and elaborate Killing Curse was the least they had to worry about if she came upon them in a fey mood. They didn't make the mistake of trying to ambush her any more, either. The Dark Lord tended to assign to her a retinue almost the equivalent of his own if he suspected an imminent battle, and he was much better at reading the Order's intentions than they his. The last time the Order had tried to ambush her in strength, she'd been accompanied by half a dozen disillusioned Death Eaters, and they'd practically ripped the heart out of the Order that day; Dumbledore and his pet phoenix had barely been able to salvage his key lieutenants, and it had been six months of rebuilding before the Order had dared show their faces in public again, whilst the tide of war shifted markedly in the Dark Lord's favour.
So long as the Dark Lord didn't do anything overly reckless, victory was inevitable now. There'd been some sort of crackpot prophecy he'd gotten word of recently – apparently referring to a son of Order members – from a couple of captives who'd been interrogated, but he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't some setup by Dumbledore, and in any case he wanted to finish off the 'ground war' before he turned his attention to anything else. And the end wouldn't be long in coming now. Just a couple more battles and auror morale would be broken and the Ministry would have to surrender themselves to the Dark Lord's will…
Would Sev have approved? She certainly hoped so. This was the best and most fitting way she could think of of trying to atone to and honour his memory, making what she was sure had been his mission her own to complete, and bringing ruin and destruction upon those who had ruined and destroyed him…
Author Notes (updated 2nd September, 2012 to clarify a timing query):
Regarding the timing of events, Severus Snape was killed by Remus Lupin in the alternate universe of this story at some point in his fourth or fifth year. I'm unclear of the exact date of the corresponding 'werewolf incident' (which Severus survives in canon) in the canon universe, but as far as I can tell it occurs at some point before the OWL exams of 1976 and the fight by the lake which ends Severus' and Lily's mutual friendship. In this universe, as in canon, at the point of Severus' encounter with Remus Lupin, Severus and Lily's friendship was under strain (due to various associates/housemates) but still just about functional.
Whilst this one-shot has ideas in common with what I am playing around with in 'Asylum', in this piece Lily has deliberately chosen her path in response to the tragic demise of a friend. As she reflects, pride has played a part in some of the decisions she's made, but there's also an underlying element of guilt to it (Was she a good enough friend? Could she have saved him?) which she declines to acknowledge.
At the point the Lily of this story got in contact with the Death Eaters, they were in a phase of the war when things were looking bad for them, and if a mudblood - correction, muggle-born - was insane enough to offer her wand for duties as what it was initially assumed would be cannon-fodder, who were they to complain once it was certain that she wasn't a spy? And then she survived the first few battles and started to learn on the front-lines and actually became quite useful...
Although Lily thinks of Dumbledore as 'wandless', that's because she took his wand (the elder wand). He probably has his old wand around somewhere still (which he defeated Grindelwald with) although he stays off the front lines now as much as possible.