Title: 12 Small Steps Against Inertia

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Harry Potter

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling.

Summary: It will put his heart out like an only eye. (Severus never did know when to say the right thing. One-sided Severus/Lily. Spoilers for Deathly Hallows.)

i. the knock of the small, new heart

He is seven, and she is still six, just a few weeks away from her own birthday, when he first spots her in Spinner's End, drifting lazily down the street with her backpack and a small hand wrapped in the hand of man. Severus assumes he is her father, a tall man with wiry copper hair, squinty eyes, and a wide mustache that at times reminds him of a huntsman, perhaps one that is like the huntsman in nursery rhymes (I hew wolves with my hands, and fell trees like sticks.)

Her father is as guileless as she, a man with no magic, but he does not seem to know of its absence. She does not seem to know he does not hold what she has either.

There's a word for it, he knows, because his mother says it so often now when talking about his father, but she says it so hatefully that he does not know how his father and this bright, sturdy man are anything alike.

"Half-bloods and Mudbloods are all alike," and Eileen Prince says this from around the rim of a bottle of lime vodka, a long hand grabbing, grinding at the roots of his hair, pulling until he thinks he can feel his skin give way from his skull. He imagines empty spaces between his flesh and bone, separating the part of his that is hers and the part of him that is solid, and thinks that this must be what it is to be half-blooded: filled with empty spaces that keep the flesh and bone apart.

"But you're mine, and that is enough," she says, and this is half-wistful, half-painful as she jerks his head to lie in the hollow of her neck. (Which hurts more? Being half a person, or being two mismatched halves, clumsily put together?) "You'll always be mine, and not his, because he doesn't understand. You'll always at least be half a Prince, and that makes you worth more than most people."

She smiles, and while Eileen Prince is no great beauty, there is an elegance in the sideways tilt of her thin lips, the crinkle of her dark eyes, and the delirious delight hidden in each crease and dip of her face. In a moment of childish fancy, Severus considers her a queen in tweed and cotton, her sceptre the neck of a bottle and her crown lost, perhaps somewhere down the sink drain where she washes her face at night. ("She's only just lost it," he thinks, "and we can go back to our castle in the moors just as soon as we fish it out of the pipes.")

"What do you think about that?" and her voice is coarse, but to him, it is but the twisting limbs of a naiad. She is magic, like the school she promises he'll go to, like the willow stick that she keeps in the front pocket of her jumper, and in her he can find no fault, even if it is her that is hollowing him out, trying to become whole again.

And because she is magic, he says nothing, because she should already know this.

He always looks for more of this world that his mother has promised him, as though it is his to own, a small toy to be ripped open and played with and thrown away at his leisure. He can see so little of that spark in the summer scorched trees and hot chain links of the swing set that he is almost bowled over with excitement when he first sees the redheaded girl and her father, walking along in the clear sight of day.

At seven, Severus Snape is hardly a poet, and he will likely never be one. He does not know what a sonnet or a hyperbole is, nor does he particularly care to ask anyone, especially knowing that his mother will hardly be in the state of mind to tell him at five in the afternoon (which you know is when she will drink the rest of the sherry). But he is still young enough, foolish enough, naive enough to fall in love with the idea of magic, and anything pertaining to it.

But like all things he loves, he will stay quiet and watch. He has only previously seen magic from a distance, done very few spells, seen very few relatives and family friends who can make the lights go out with a motion, let sparrows dance over their fingers and just as easily fly away and dissolve into nothing.

He will instead watch, and pretend. It is much nobler than making a fool of himself. Severus will of course forget in those early years just how curly her hair had been, how overjoyed she had been to do her first piece of accidental magic (though how a hundred gold butterflies is accidental is beyond you; even your mother smiles when one alights on her greasy windowsill and dissolves into a sweet smell), and how much she had smiled when there was snowfall in the winter that came before the first time they would meet properly.

She walks down the street with her father, only aware of him in the vaguest sense. That is enough for him.

ii. in any case, you are always there

He tries not to take her presence for granted, which is probably what he ought to do to keep at bay the devastating fear that she will leave someday, despite promises of showing her his mother's magic and kind words that stick in his throat and feel hot and choked on his face. Severus always plans exactly what it is that he wants to say to Lily, and this more than anything accounts for the long silences between them.

Lily, with impish words that skitter between tree branches and the shell lines of his ear, does not always try to fill that gap. She knows perfectly well (or so you hope) exactly what he means, and instead pumps at the swing until she is moving fast enough to cover up the summer stillness with heart beats and shallow breezes.

They are beginning their second year in a few days, and Lily will have to go back to Gryffindor and all the others there that sometime he feels are trying to steal her away, as though she were something to keep. (You will think this more in a few years, and more yet when you know that this is exactly what those lion-hungry hands have done. You will resent it when it happens, and say in a voice that may have been yours a decade earlier that she was yours first, and that her jewel-set eyes shared delight and laughter with you before anyone else.)

For now, he watches her swing and wonders what he should say next. She kicks her feet beneath her, grazing the tips of the long grass that grows behind the swing set, and Severus watches as the fragile stalks bend underneath her dirty trainers that she has drawn old alchemy arrays on.

("Aristotle knew just as much about potions as any master brewer these days," she says with an air of confidence from beneath Slughorn's watch. Severus smiles awkwardly, agrees, and writes in his school book, a habit that Lily is irritated by. He hopes she won't notice that he has already begun writing Plato in the margins. After all, he doesn't want to like her more than he should just yet. )

He's terrified that someday she might think he's dull and begin to not miss him during the school year. But he will always miss her in between the stones and stairs and children that are so bold as to be a fence between them, even if he might not admit it later on.

iii. and like the cat, I have nine times to die

"Mudbloods and Half-bloods are all the same" is what Eileen Prince had said, and twelve years later he feels the same feelings welling up within him, surging past a long harbored love and swinging out like an axe, something that breaks down and cuts out from beneath people. His rapid inhalation after the insults does nothing to cover them up, and his heart goes weak with anxiety.

"I thought you were different," Lily says, and the hurt is covered up with anger, but he can see her bristling like an animal, knows where the injury is and is unable to approach. "I've been telling all of them that for so long that I guess that I had myself convinced it was true."

"I didn't mean it for you," he says, and winces at the weakness of it.

"But you said it all the same, you unfeeling snake," she says, and flicks her hair over her shoulder.

"Lily, I . . . " But he doesn't finish, instead feeling something breaking off inside of him, moving like a chunk of glass between ventricles. It leaves gashes, ones that he cannot see. (This is an ending to something, and your young heart knows that it is more important than your rational young mind is prepared to accept. This is an ending to something and you are letting it happen because logic and pride are that much stronger than the compassion that you are slowly unlearning in the face of a decade and a half of disappointment.)

She does not give him enough time to finish.

iv. one day I shall manage without her

They meet again in the summer, sitting awkwardly at the swing set at Spinner's End. It is drought season, and the grass is itchy and yellow beneath their trainer's and their plastic chairs, and both try not to wince at the sound of their feet, crunching it up into nothing. Here, in the heat and embarrassment, it is hard to imagine that it will ever be rainy and cool again.

Her hair is radiant gold-bronze-amber in the dying sun, and he can see nothing of dirty blood in her, but he knows it's there and his bitterness is assuaged for a moment.

"I feel like you don't want me around anymore," she says, chewing her pony tail between her front teeth. She does the same to her graphite pencils, because quills are not much good for anything other than breaking.

Severus shakes his head, perhaps too quickly. "That's not what I want at all."

"But is what you are getting nonetheless. I can't very easily slide into your group of Slytherins, even less so because of James and Sirius. Besides," she adds, quietly enough to draw attention, "I'm not much good for the Dark Arts."

"Then why them and not me?" he says, and tries not to be too open. (You will ignore the last part, which may be the most important part.)What's so great about James Potter, who is as rude as he is presumptuous, that we can't be friends the way we used to be?"

She does not respond at first, instead glaring at a passing cloud and again at a stalk of withered rapeseed flowers. They will not last this summer, even with an extra cold front coming in from the west.

(They used to smell strongly, you recall, when they were first planted by a set of tender white freckled hands and spring had been sweet and safely at home. It is the second time that you meet with her after your introduction, and Petunia is no where in sight, which makes you sigh in relief.

"What is it that you are doing?" you say with a child's curiosity, something that magic and men have tried to beat out of you from the moment you first stepped into school. This is this, and that is that, and you will find that they can never be another way. Your curiosity has been upset like a glass of water, and you will watch it sink into the dry ground.

Lily looks at you, and the spark of her smile is enough to make you smile in turn. You hadn't been happy minutes before. In fact you can still feel your father's hands on your arms, breaking what you know are capillaries that will bloom into finger shaped flowers.

"I'm planting flowers of course," she says as though it were so very obvious. "I suppose wizards and witches do that, right?"

You nod, and help, because it seems like what she wants, and it is all right for wizards to do this sort of thing anyway. You said so yourself.)

It is very still when the sun begins to go down, and Lily has not answered him yet. Severus begins to think that she doesn't mean to answer him at all, and that they will simply never be at an accord with one another ever again. Something inside of him tears at the thought. He suspects it's whatever's left of his heart, like some scrap of note that can be ripped out and written on to his content.

She turns to him, and he tries to fold up whatever he is writing inside.

"They mean something to me, that bunch, no matter how unkind they are," she says at last, and Severus feels as though he has been punched. "We're in the same house, and they're awfully good to the other Gryffindors, even nice sometimes. They've been trying to be my friends, and you . . . you've been pushing me away. Like I embarrass you."

"So then we're not friends, because I don't beg you to study with me? What sort of rot is that?" he asks, and almost smiles when he keeps the hurt out of it. "We've been around each other since before Potter and his merry men ever decided to show up at all."

Lily's frown is always a miserable looking one. "And yet you act like you don't need me at all. I stick up for you and you call me names. That's not being friends."

"So I look like a fool to keep you from having hurt feelings?" he scoffs. "Being defended when I can handle something like that myself is degrading. You're trying to save me, like you're some sort of hero. Snivellus gets saved by a girl from the scary Marauders, then?" He stands and pushes away from the swing. "No thank you."

Severus Snape walks away, and hopes that the foreboding in his paper-tatter heart is nothing but a bunch of hubris from the books that he reads for Lily's sake. After all, life isn't some sort of romance, and he is not the gentleman in black.

(Tomorrow, you will find the rapeseed flowers replaced with azaleas of a brilliant yellow. Every petal makes you sick with loneliness, but the Slytherin resilience you have taught yourself soon makes a mask and you are able to look at red hair from across the Great Hall without too much pain between your collar and chest. After all, you were the one that walked away.)

v. the white gape of his mind was the real tabula rasa

In the end, he resents his tongue for its ability to speak, its motions to form sounds and words, because now he knows that he may betray himself with it. The threat have always lingered somewhere inside, riding on a sibilant 's' or a rolling 'l', but he has never felt it as acutely as he does now.

The Dark Lord is a formidable man, pale and tall and forbidding as a cathedral tower, and every bit as sharp and convoluted. He frowns from a cherry wood chair (the kind of wood they make wands with, you think with a hollow amusement), moving from between rage and pleasure. He should feel pain, he thinks, reversing his rhythm and mind so abruptly. The shift from acid to sugar should corrode his very veins, and Severus tries not to hope too hard for this.

"Prophecies are but maudlin nonsense," says Voldemort, "but is it worth the risk, do you suppose? Fools have died for less, and if nothing else, Dumbledore is definitely one." Spider fingers tap and crack the wood of the chair.

"If what Snape says is right, then it's authentic enough to cause worry," says Malfoy, and Severus bites his tongue to keep from cracking his neck in anger. (Forget, forget, forget I ever said anything. Isn't that what you want? You always did try to correct your mistakes, but this is an awfully large one, even for a prince amongst men. You could have raised a hand, killed them all before they even knew what was happening, were it not that you were afraid.)

"It's simple enough," says Voldemort. "I'll just kill the Potter family and make certain that this little prophecy doesn't go much of anywhere. Hmm, I believe there is an adage that says 'better safe than sorry'." The man smiles, if it can be called that, and peers through slit eyes. The eyes beneath the lids are wounded-flesh-red, and he tries not to think of Lily's hair at a time like this, not when those eyes are looking at him from beneath the cover of cells and blood and a barely contained disease-that-cannot-be-named.

"But for now I think I will talk with our friend Severus."

(You don't kill him, though your right hand is shaking with nerves and anticipation. You will not be desperate enough until later, and then it will be too late.)

vi. death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar

("What do you think of this lace, Severus?" she asks, and her eyes are painfully bright, so much so that he never looks to see exactly what it is he's supposed to be looking at. )

There is something devastating in the curve of her neck and the stillness of her eyelids (which previously had always been so lively, so verdant, and God, can't you feel that sickness growing in the back of your throat and your heart already? You will tear it out yourself, that wretched thing that chokes and that clenches tightly around something other than muscle and blood.) It's all very familiar, nothing he hasn't been looking at since he was a child, but at the same time he can't help but think that this must be a different person, and that he's not actually standing here.

The chin is the same, the roulette of freckles and smile lines is somewhere underneath all of that powder, and he knows that on her left ankle ought to be a scar from when she fell out of the maple tree in his backyard during their summer vacation of third year. But this white clad body is a shell, something of limestone and sand and salt that the sea has created and left behind for people to pick up and call pretty. (Venus of the Rocks, your mind supplies, and how her face -glows- in linseed and the fluorescence of a hallway.) He cannot completely associate it with Lily Evans, who by all rights ought to be laughing at the absurdity of this show of tears. But not his face. It is frozen, he thinks, in a constant state of stoicism, which is appropriate for someone such as myself.

Somehow, he thinks that she would have probably resented it.

"I never did much care for funerals," says Albus from his side, and Severus does nothing but tentatively shift his head away from the spiral of Lily's hair between her throat and the pine wood coffin. "It's a great loss. Lily was a wonderful pupil, very keen on charms. It is not the natural order of things for the teacher to outlive the student."

"If you think me the type to openly express my sentiments, then perhaps you should move on to Lupin or McGonagall who will be more than happy to mourn with you," he says, wishing it didn't sound so vacant. (But don't think of vacancy just yet, like someone will come into her body or yours and everything will continue on as it ought to, because things don't work quite like that, and you are a void that endlessly empties whatever was left of you.)

He doesn't know why he is here at all. He does not want to be here, staring at her in her wedding gown, a fragile Muggle thing made of silk and satin, and all manners of Brittany lace that he knows Black had imported especially for Lily, because she told him all about it, too excited to remember that they are not supposed to be friends anymore and that he has maligned her and she has abandoned him. At the time, Severus has too much heart for her to tell her to go away. He did not want to hear about Potter marrying her, nor that Sirius Black is the best man.

But Lily looks soft and small and lovely in that Brittany lace, even now.

"Grieving is the natural course of things," says Albus, and he is forced to attend yet again to this man's words, his almost-deceit that Severus can sometimes feel hiding. The Hogwarts Headmaster is careful, taking baby steps around his side, like the floor will crack underneath him because they are both so heavy with guilt. The weight of the stilled Dark Mark should be quite enough to bury the both of them, and Severus blindly folds his arms and stares at the satin lining of the open coffin.

Severus cannot find it in himself to care, not when he is right before the one thing he has ever wanted, and she will be given to the dirt before he can ever have her.

Her hair will make beautiful roots, he thinks, and loses his sight somewhere in the circle of a curl and the shades of red-brown-blonde-gold that look like summers at Spinner's End to him. There in the fine lines of a lock he can see sidewalk pavement and the cracks between them, and how he explained superstitions were ridiculous while she laughed and skipped over the lines anyway.

Here in the split ends he can see dried grass and two children covering their faces with textbooks as not to burn (and how easily you burn after all, the both of you, when she is so fair and careless, while you seek it out). Out of the hundreds of people in this room, he is the only one who can see an old maple tree in that painful line that makes her shoulder and arm, and physically feel the absence of weight and colour on the eighth branch up, which she will disappear from forever.

Somehow that makes him ten years old again and very lonely.

vii. it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one

The tombstone at Godric's Hollow is shared by the Potter couple, and it takes all of Severus' power to ignore every name except for hers amidst all of them. He has a hard time imagining that she is beneath his feet as he speaks, ten years dead, and almost twenty years lost to him. There are no flowers or trees growing up from the soil like he thought there might be, and he is half disappointed to discover that there are no russet roots shooting up at him from beneath the chill Scottish stone.

It is a rare thing for him to find the time and money between the school sessions to visit this place. He does not do it very often, because the sky is always grey and cold, and the trees always shadows in his vision. He feels his sight tunnel on her name each time he sees the chiseled letters, and imagines that this single-minded absence of focus is his one reprieve in a decade.

I've lost a lot to you, he thinks, I've lost everything to you because now that you are not here there is nothing that I enjoy anymore.

He had not hoped to teach. He had not hoped to live after the time of the war. He does only now because of what one meddling old man has in mind for him. This year his trials begin all over again because it is this year that Lily's son will be inside the school, no doubt a child celebrity, loved and followed by all. He tries not to feel too bitter about it because he has promised, and that has to amount to something.

Severus Snape keeps his promises and his secrets to himself. He will never be seen standing at the graveyard in Godric's Hollow if he can. Almost twenty years later, his heart is still too raw to admit to anyone he hasn't already that he is a hollow man that moves only when asked to. (The only exception, you know, is right now.)

viii. here are two pupils whose moons of black transform to cripples all who look

The first time that he steps into his line of vision, a small nothing with pale cheeks and messy black hair that all screams out to be that of another man, Severus is certain that he will be unable to think of this child as anything other than James Potter's son. He may not have the swagger of a proud pureblood that is secure in his house, or the twinkle of mischief just hiding somewhere in the tilt of his lips, but hatred is a very powerful thing, and Severus has never particularly tried to look out from behind it.

I will stomp humility into him, he thinks, as though seven years of school and a lifetime of private humiliations could be amended in some clipped words and an insult. I will stop whatever James has begun in him and fashion him into something else. He will be able to protect something that looks and acts more like Lily, so he must simply fish out from that tiny-boned replica what it is that he seeks.

(A translucent skinned boy, prone to freckles and sunburn and scrapes from the mulberry and the Lily-pale birch trees that he has allowed to grow around his bedroom, as to quickly block out the sun. You'll never beat that russet-red into him with anything other than bruises and blood, and you don't know how to raise a hand to something that is hers)

Only he doesn't.

One glance, one hurt glare from the eyes of a child that he has neither seen nor met before this very moment and he feels as if every ill he has meant has been sucked out of him and into the air, where it will disappear, settle, and gather until he thinks to sweep it away.

It is the middle of a potions class lecture, the first one in a room full of stupid children, and Severus will not let himself be seen so weak in front of them. In less than the blink of an eye, he collects himself and stores what's left of him away. He will lock himself up and throw away the key, or else he will love this boy unconditionally for the rest of his life. (At times you wonder if this hasn't already happened.)

"He has her eyes," Albus will say later that evening, sipping away at his Darjeeling and lemon as though that is exactly what he ought to be doing, which he really isn't because he is baiting him with ways to make him servile. Severus is quick to pick up on this, and chokes the disobedience in himself by remembering that this is what he asked for, and God damn him if he isn't going to go through with it.

"It's obscene," he breathes into the stillness of the headmaster's office, "it's obscene how she is still looking at me when I know perfectly well that she is not here at all. She's dead, it's his fault, and he has the . . . the gall to steal her eyes."

"Harry is not Lily, and he has done nothing to merit such insults," says the headmaster, who looks both sad and frustrated at once. "He never will be her, he is not at fault for her death, (though you might be, hangs unsaid) and you might as well put that thought out of your head. But I do think you will find that, in some ways, he is more like his mother than he will ever be like his father."

"No," he breathes, and the words are cold and heavy in the open air. He wonders if they won't anchor him down, somewhere beneath the foundations. He would like to be that steady, that grounded and certain of himself. As it is, he has to promise himself that he will not see anything of her. "I do not think that he will be at all different from James. A few days into the school year, and he is already a celebrity, a house favorite," he hisses.

Albus Dumbledore has sense enough to not respond. (But this is a lie, because you only want him to be quiet when you know there are a thousand things he has said to you within a parting shot of eyes over the rim of his tea cup.) He drinks from his cup and saucer, and lets Severus think exactly whatever he thinks will keep him together.

This, more than anything, makes him bite his tongue and pretend this night has never happened.

Eleven-year-olds, he thinks resolutely, do not wear the eyes of the dead. They do not steal flesh from graves and graft it into themselves. They are whole, unlike me, and that is all the difference between Harry Potter, Lily Evans, and myself. With this in mind, he sets to burying anything left of her in the dull glances he throws from across the Great Hall, in subtle magic that keeps Potter from hitting the ground, in bitter-frost words that he can only hope cut as deeply as his presence does. One day, he will learn to chill that anger in his heart.

ix. looking, with its hooks, for something to love

He is perfectly accustomed to lying, being lied to, and building off of lies to his content. He usually can see right through them, everything from the shallow ones of students to decades worth of plotting in the likes of the headmaster. Lies are like streams of smoke, and they veil nothing from him since he will eventually wave them away. Scatter, like so many birds, he thinks, and the trailing smell of honey shifts away to where he can breathe again.

But this time, the unveiling, usually something that he works so hard to get down to, is something that he's not sure he wants to hear at all.

They sit, the headmaster and himself, drinking from tea cups that are already empty, but neither one is aware enough to remedy the situation. Tea is quickly gone anyway, and it is the motion that comforts them more than the actual taste. Severus feels his throat burn from a swallow that had nothing in it regardless, and accordingly winces.

"I don't want to do this," he says, and he feels as though this is the first true remorse he has felt in years.

"But you have to."

"What if I don't?"

"I know you will."

Severus knows perfectly well that he will, and curses himself, staring into the veins and wrinkles of Albus' good hand. He does not worry about being rude anymore, because he knows that it is only a matter of time before the headmaster owes him a great deal more than a regular salary and a cup of tea once a week to see how the students are doing.

This time, when he puts his cup down, he actually does refill it.

"It will save Harry," Albus adds, as though this will be enough to make Snape agree with him this time (for all time). Severus has been saving Harry since first glance, and the headmaster knows his heart well enough to know that he cannot suffer another loss (of any sort).

"It will kill him," he says.

"It will save him," Albus says again, and looks at his from over the edge of the half-moon spectacles. He resents them, wants to rip them from the old man's face and crush them. It won't make him feel any better, but something in his half-mad mind thinks that it will, and Severus is tired enough of being told what to do.

He thinks of her again, even now, especially now, and tries to draw strength from the fact that this is what had to happen. We're supposed to be saving him, he thinks, and feels more than sees Lily's mouth draw into a smile from somewhere, perhaps from the yearbook that Albus keeps on his bookshelf, or the hallway of prefects.

"Very well," he says tightly.

(You'll destroy all of your own idols one by one until there is nothing left but dust and shadows. You are a walking iconoclasm, and this self-defeating walk will leave you with nothing before you are done, save perhaps an invasive hurt that you cannot name, and the distant memory of eyes that are not exactly hers or his, but cut deeply all the same with their intensity of color and pattern.)

x. they would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels

Grimmauld Place is unpleasantly chilly the final time that he crosses its threshold, deftly moving around the wards placed against him by the Order. He is clever enough, no, bitter enough to be able to stand in the face of not-Albus Dumbledore and tell him that it was not he who killed him, no matter what the charm may suggest. (And you didn't kill him, you tell yourself over and over again. It's what he wanted wasn't it? He wanted to go quietly, slide away without pain and that's what you did for him. If only you could feel a little less bruised each time you think of lemon drops and half-moons.) The dust is thick here, and Severus cannot help but feel like an intruder in a mausoleum.

He has to clear away whatever is left of his own, to leave a place for Potter and his friends to hide. They will not want anything related to him to be anywhere near themselves. He cannot wholly blame them. He will gather his cobwebs and papers and draw himself into his old-new home in Hogwarts. Sometimes it even feels warm there.

But against his better judgment, each step leads him into a room that he knows perfectly well is not his own and that he would have never stepped foot in of his own accord. The air is thick here, dusty, and if he is not careful of how he breathes, he thinks he can still taste something of people hidden in it, as though they are just around the corner, hiding. (There are flax flowers in it, a quiet aroma that invades and spreads across you painfully. She used to wear it, you think, in her hair and on her wrists. You were the first to give her one for summer solstice, pulled it right out of the back garden bed and slid it past your mother's rheumy and questioning eyes.)

They are quiet, these non-people, like the photographs that he watches move, their lips widening and rounding in letters, but cannot hear over the mute of the sepia and wood pulp. Much of this he suspects is because of the old pictures that Sirius Black has covered the walls in, where he can see the dark eyes of Regulus and Sirius staring out at him, the two standing stiffly next to each other in their wizarding best. Further down, James Potter waves half-heartedly from the window seat of Gryffindor Tower, only twelve years old and already brimming with mischief. The rest of the old group is of course spread out on the walls, nails beaten and ripped into the plaster to put something of old memories there. Severus wonders, for the first time, if Black meant to wound the house somehow, as though fingernails and boots would be enough to punish sixteen years of misery to a heavy-handed pureblood family.

He would laugh at such foolishness, but something inside squirms with pity and he brutally must push it back before it can take root.

There are no pictures of her. And there are no pictures of the boy, which surprises him. But there are papers, drawers and drawers of them, filled with letters and bills that were addressed to Black. They are creased, well-read, and filled with an uncommon curiosity, he looks for the familiar signature of Lily Evans. (She always did dot her 'i' with a dash, as though too busy to bother with being neat. Her leftward slant always did seem uniquely hers in your eyes.)

He looks for much longer than he intends, idly throwing papers over his shoulders, completely ignoring them after a quick glance. He's not entirely sure why he's looking at all when there's so little hope that he will find a letter from Lily, and even less likely to fill this void that he fills growing, consuming itself with each tossed note and picture.

I will strive to be less mad, he thinks wryly, and ploughs on as though he has said nothing to himself at all.

He will find a letter eventually, one that is hardly any business of his at all (you are trampling over another man's love for her, and you can't seem to reconcile that this is not a moment of yours to look in on), and he will only see that she sends lots of love. He can imagine how she would say it, how her quill would twirl and flourish underneath the loop of her 'l' and flick ink because she always bears down too hard at the end of a sentence.

But for now, he mindlessly goes through the mail, and tries not to let his hands shake every time he finds that someone else has dashed instead of dotted their 'i'. They are not thieves, he reminds himself, and tries not to laugh too hard while he opens another wax seal.

xi. it looks in on, and must go on looking in on

The doe has very soft eyes, made of mist and a tangible want that Severus is embarrassed to show at the best of times and heartsick to show at the worst. It is a secret that he wishes to keep to himself, and swallows his shame the first time he admits to Albus Dumbledore why his Patronus is the way that it is. Always, he says, and at the time does not consider just how long that really is. But he is still young enough then to think and speak in hyperbole, even if he doesn't do it very often. The tightness in the corners of his eyes and chest feel like they will be like that forever. (And this shall never pass, a younger version of yourself says.)

Standing in the winter snow on the edge of the Forest of Dean, the doe looks very incriminating, evidence to some horrible crime. He is aiding a master con by summoning her right now, and he is slowly but surely destroying that which he swears to protect. Severus Snape is used to feeling wicked, but never enough so to make him consider giving up. He is dependably stubborn if nothing else.

The fir trees are dark and sharp against the edge of his face, but he stands resolutely still when Potter walks out from his tent and looks at the doe Patronus with a reverent gaze. Severus, despite wishing nothing more than to hide the Patronus, calls her back and stows away his longing in the grain of a wand and the ether in his mind, lets the soft doe eyes break from his own and move to Potter's.

He is sick at heart to watch her weave through the trees, leading and dancing like a thing of air that takes his fancy, knowing perfectly well that it is not his to have but his magic's. They are not connected, not the way that a heart and a body might be, but as two coexistent beings. He will never be able to touch the cool air that forms the lithe legs, the long spine, the gentle eyes and nose.

But neither will anyone else, and he supposes that will be enough for now.

Always, he had said, and standing in the snow of the Forest of Dean, feeling rawer and colder than he has ever felt in his life while leading Harry Potter to another victory, Severus knows how incredibly large that is, how eternal that is, and still feels able to say it.

The doe has very soft eyes. He only imagines they glance at him because always is a long time.

venia. love is the bone and sinew of my curse

My memory is liquid and it is running away from me, he thinks with something of a dry laugh that he knows he often used to give on the back porch, running over his and her potions notes from the year before. But that is neither here nor there, because that particular memory is actually in a stone basin, far away from where he is now.

He can see the blood, and he can feel the dull throb of the wounds in his shoulder, where he can even now imagine the screaming out of the rent skin, a crater in the lines of his earth. It is a lot darker and thinner than he would have thought that his blood ought to be. He remembers it much redder and brighter, but God only knows how long ago that was. (You were five, actually, and you had tripped on the scrap metal from down the lane, just twisting enough to land left arm first in shrapnel. You did not cry. Your mother did, however, when the stitches that your father insisted you have cost more than the dignity he would have sacrificed to let your mother use magic. She was almost as red as you by the end of it all. Eileen Snape never did look good when she cried, did she?)

Severus knows he should be borderline hysterical, and while he cannot control the shuddering of his body, he is very calm. He has not done what Albus told him, to tell Harry (and you relent and call him that now, because no one is left to see you admit to it), and while he knows that it needs to be done, he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to be the one to kill Lily's son, and he is half-mad with the terror of what his life is worth in the advent of that. He has geared sixteen years to seeing nothing but that Albus's will be fulfilled.

Something inside of him rebels at the sight of Harry pulling his invisibility cloak off, his face covered in terror and anger and a thousand other smaller things that he has seen written in one other face but does not care to name. The boy is as well as can be expected, drained and weary in a way that Severus is all too familiar with.

But even in the face of his own rebellion and death, he finds it, still, in himself to command, and sends Potter his mercurial thoughts and memory. In this he is free of Albus Dumbledore. And at last he can feel the air as light as it ought to be, despite the fluid that is crawling with thorned tendrils into his chest and throat. They are very much like her branches, her russet-haired twigs and leaves that curled into her and the dirt of Godric's Hollow.

It is his own bit of humidity and dust, foul tasting and rife with the smell of his own sickness, and he sucks it in greedily with a cough and gasp since it will only be his, even with this other boy in the room. In another place, worlds away from this rickety old house, he might have been disgusted with his own avarice. As it is now, he is only relieved.

His arms are shaking, quivering more than he can recall (and you think, because isn't that what Severus Snape does?), moving with such intention that even when he feels his fingers press against the soft cotton of Harry's shirt, he cannot remind himself that he is the Half-blood Prince, and that magic belongs to him and that he may take what he wants from it. It is secondary to his questing fingers ( you have hands) and eyes.

Harry is not Lily, Dumbledore says from somewhere in the back of his mind, looking regretfully at him, like his expression alone ought to forgive the travesty of having green eyes that are the same but not, and above all else he does not care. They're not the same and he can spend the rest of his life wishing otherwise, but for now the difference between the two isn't all that important. It is only essential for once in his life to say exactly what he is thinking, what he is wanting, and for once in his life he is desperate to do just that. (It is better to wear your heart on your sleeve than in your chest.)

"Look at me," he says.

Harry looks.

The irises are as pale and new as spring, as he can ever remember in her heart-shaped face, and somewhere in there he can see where her freckles should be and her scrunched-up nose because Lily hates it when he stares too long. We ought to be studying, she would say, and really mean that they ought to be doing something else because what is the good of sitting around and saying nothing that you really mean? "Inanities," he will learn to say later on, when his wit has usurped his heart.

Lily would laugh to look at what he has become, a fey, featherweight thing that moves through the shell of an ear, too hearty and strong for what the occasion calls for (and she was always like that, something you forgot to credit to her instead of her blood). As long as it's her, he doesn't think that he minds all that much. He is near trembling with tenderness.

In the corona of those eyes, he feels summer again.

memento mori: this is the city where broken men are mended.