Loved and Lost
By Misha

Disclaimer- Everything belongs to J.K. Rowling and is not mine, however much I might wish differently. However, I am not making any money off of this, so please do not sue me!

Author's Notes- This is another angsty Snape fic. This is Snape/Lily as well as Snape/Hermione. See, I really intended to give Snape a happy ending after the tragic romance of his past, but that didn't happen. Instead, I put him through emotion destruction once again. Sorry, I have a habit of doing that . Anyway, this does not really have anything to do with my previous Lily/Snape fics, but it could possibly fit into the same universe as "Memories of the Heart", at least with the Lily/Snape back-story. That is all for now, enjoy! And remember, feedback is the most wonderful thing in the world! I live for it!

Pairing- Snape/Lily, Snape/Hermione.

Summery- Love breaks you, he learnt that the hard way. He loved twice and both times he was left a shattered mess.

Rating- PG

Love is a funny thing.

A horrible, wonderful thing.

It is so rare and so beautiful, yet so painful. It is the most addicting drug in the world. It consumes you completely.

And it can leave you shattered.

It took me a very long time to recover from the first time I fell in love.

Actually, that is not true, because I never did recover, not really. It left me so shattered that I vowed that I would never, ever fall in love again.

But I did.

Against my better judgement, I gave my heart once more. And It was nothing like the first time.

The two women were not a lot like. Except that I should never have loved either of them. But I loved them both.

I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen and I stayed there for the rest of my life.

It would have been impossible for me not to have loved Lily. She was so beautiful, so full of life. Her green eyes shimmered like emeralds, her red hair fell down her back like silk. She was like a goddess put on Earth to enchant us mere mortals. And she did.

But not just because of her physical beauty. But because of the beauty of her mind and spirit. Her heart and soul.

Lily was the kindest, most gentle person I ever met.

She was too good for me. I almost hated myself for the fact that Lily loved me.

Because I was not worthy of that love. Not ever in a million lifetimes would I ever deserve her heart.

But I had it. For a moment at least.

But I ruined it. My actions destroyed the fragile bond we shared. It was my fault that I lost her I know that.

But, despite everything, Lily never really stopped caring for me.

And in the end, she was my salvation.

It is funny in a way, she was both my salvation and my destruction.

It was because of her that I returned to the side of good. But it was also because of her that I lived so many years of my life shattered and broken.

A large part of me died with her.

I spent more than fifteen years wondering how I would ever survive in a world without her.

Her laughter, her beauty, her joy in the world around her had filled my world for so long, even when she was not in my life at least I knew that she was still there. That there was still perfection in the world.

I hated the world for taking her from me. I often wondered why someone as flawed as I had lived, when she had died.

I knew from the moment that Albus told me of her death that there would be no one like her. That no would ever replace her in my heart.

I was right. No one ever replaced my beautiful Lily in my heart.

It would have been impossible. Lily was my first love.

When I met her, I was the most innocent that I ever was. She was a symbol of a time in my life long gone.

Lily will always represent my youth. She is a constant reminder of childhood hopes and dreams as dead as she is. I will never be the man, no the boy, who loved Lily Evans again.

I can not be.

But I was wrong in believing that I would never love again.

Because I did. And I loved just as deeply as I had the first time.

But in a totally different way. This love was so wrong. But so right at the same time.

She was a student of mine. One whom I had never been particularly kind to.

Mainly because of her choice of friends. She was best friends with the boy whose very presence was a constant reminder of my pain.

Lily's son.

The very image of his father, of the man that Lily had married and loved, of a man who was not me. But Lily's eyes shone from that face.

It was a horribly unsettling combination. The face of a man I hated, but the eyes of a woman I had cherished.

And it stabbed my heart whenever I saw him.

So I took my pain out on him by being horrible to him. And to his friends.

They all hated me.

At first. Grudgingly, they began to respect me when they learnt of my role in the cause.

Lily's son never liked me. I know that.

Nor did he ever know of my past with his mother. There was no point in me telling him.

After all, it was the past. It was long gone. Just like Lily.

Still, we had to work together for a common goal.

And it was then that I began to notice her as more than just a friend of the Boy Who Lived.

She was still my student then, so I refused to acknowledge any feelings I might have for her.

Besides, I did not even want to imagine loving anyone besides my Lily. After all, love had brought me so much pain in the past.

But, she graduated and came back as a teacher, despite her young age, and I could not deny my attraction to her.

It was strange.

Hermione Granger was so different than Lily. Both physically and personality-wise.

Oh, they were both caring and gentle people, both Muggle-born, ironically enough, but other than that...

Hermione was so studious, so enraptured in the written word. Lily had been a good student, but she much preferred other activities. And they were different in a million subtle ways.

I reminded myself of this constantly as I found myself falling for her. Mostly, though, I reminded myself of the fact that she was too young for me and that I never wanted to love again.

Still, in the end I did.

And she loved me in return.

I was amazed when I learnt that. When Hermione looked up at me with earnest eyes and told me that she loved me, I could barely believe it.

For a moment, I felt completely free. The same way I had so many years before, when Lily whispered those precious words to me.

Yet, at the same time, I felt guilty.

In my mind I had nothing to offer her. Hermione was so young, only twenty then, and I was so much older, if not in body, then certainly in spirit.

But it did not change anything. I still fell deeply in love.

I did not love her quite as intensely as I had loved Lily, nor as optimistically. I was older, more jaded, and never quite as alive as I had been.

Still, for the first time since her death, Lily no longer haunted my every waking moment. My hear no longer ached for every second of every day.

For it had finally opened up again.

Hermione had brought happiness back into my life after many years. She made me smile and laugh for the first time since Lily. She brought back a little bit of the old me, the part of myself that I had thought was lost forever.

However, despite the happiness that I had found at last, it was not a happy time.

The war with Voldemort was raging. It was a dark, miserable time. Darker even than the days of his first reign of terror. We were all fighting desperately with all that we had in us.

The losses were numerous. Every night we went to sleep not knowing if our loved ones would be alive when we woke up.

I saw too many friends and allies dead. And too many students. Too many bright futures were snuffed out in front of me.

It was a horrible time to be in love.

I was consumed with the fear that I would lose Hermione. That she would be taken from me by the same monster who took Lily.

I did not think that I could survive that twice. But, at the same time, I could not stop loving Hermione.

I needed her. She was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time.

As things grew darker and the end seemed certain, I gave into my heart's desire and I married her.

It was selfish, but I wanted to be able to call her mine, to claim as I was never able to claim Lily.

So, we married. I wish I could say we lived happily ever after.

But we did not.

There were not that many happy endings available at that time and luck obviously was not with us.

She died. Hermione was twenty-four, we had been married less than a year, when she fell to the Death Eaters. She was only two years older than Lily had been when she had lost her life.

It broke my heart. Another woman I loved gone.

They were both so young, so beautiful, so full of life. They both deserved better than they got.

The war eventually ended.

Voldemort was vanquished. This time they say it was forever.

But... It was too late for me. Voldemort's death would not bring back what I had lost.

It would not make up for the pain I suffered.

What had been left of my heart after Lily, the parts that Hermione had brought back to life, shattered along with the rest of it.

I felt even more old and broken than I had before.

I had fallen in love twice and twice had I gotten my heart broken.

I knew as I buried my sweet Hermione that I would never love again.

That twice had been enough for me.

Besides there was not enough of me left for me to love again.

Hermione and Lily had each taken too much.

So I knew that I would spend the rest of my life alone, mourning them both. That I would be doomed to remember them and to see them wherever I went.

Lily, the ghost of my youth. My heart's first love. The one I let slip away, but could never forget.

Hermione, who taught me to love again. My adult passion. My wife.

They both haunted me.

Years have past since Hermione's death. I am old in years now, as I have long since been old in spirit. I have spent the years that have passed tied to the past.

I have never loved anyone in the years since Hermione's death. But then I knew that I wouldn't.

The mistakes of the past were too raw. They would never go away.

Besides, my experience had taught me that love was too dangerous.

It was more potent than any potion I could ever brew. It destroyed me.

They destroyed me.

I have loved and I have lost, and I never recovered from either.

The End