Author's Note: This is another in the "Unsent Letters Series", of which "The Apology" was the first installment. This letter is dated before that one. It is in the spring of Severus and Lily's Sixth Year at Hogwarts.

A Hell of Our Own Making

March 16, 1976

Sev,

You will probably never get this letter because I will probably never get the courage to send it to you, and really what would be the point, anyway… You would probably take one look at the name on the envelope and toss the thing for fear it might be discovered by someone in your house, and you might have to defend your correspondence with “the little ginger-headed mudblood twat”, or at least that’s what they say Mulciber’s taken to calling me. But then you probably already know that.

Bullocks - that tone is really not the one that I wanted to set in this letter. I didn’t start out writing it because I wanted to pick a fight. I started to write it because…Well, I…I don’t really know, I suppose. I guess I just thought that the way it ended wasn’t really right, that neither of us got to say what we were really thinking.

You think that the reason it is over is because you called me ‘that’, because of the friends you keep, the circles you choose to walk in. Well, that’s a part of it, to be sure, but that isn’t all. No, there were other things too, things that were always there - things that you were aware of and I was aware of, but that neither of us wanted to talk about.

Your jealousy of James Potter was one. Oh, I know you don’t want to hear that name. In some ways I don’t blame you. Potter is still, and no doubt always will be a hopeless prat, but it is your jealousy of him that I want to address here. And no, there is no sense in trying to deny that jealousy was just exactly what it was.

Sirius Black thinks it’s because you are jealous of his good looks and Quidditch skills. I think its something else entirely. It’s the same reason that I am sometimes gripped with jealousy when I see you in the corridors this year with Lavinia Flint, or hear whisperings of the way that Narcissa Black stole as many minutes as she could subtly manage with you at the Malfoy’s Yule Ball this last holiday. I am not jealous of Narcissa’s wealth, or beauty, or connections. I’m not jealous of Lavinia’s intelligence, or wit, or dark eyes. No, rather I am jealous of the fact that they are spending time with you when I cannot.

There, it’s been said now. I suppose that surprises you – that I might be jealous where you are concerned. If I care for you so little that I am willing to end our friendship forever, you are probably wondering how in bloody hell I can sit here and write something out that seems so very, very contradictory.

Well, you’ve always been a hopeless case where emotional awareness is concerned, haven’t you been? There are things you just don’t understand. You force people into corners, force them to make decisions that have no happy outcome, no resolution but one that will end up causing you hurt. It’s like you want to be hurt. Like you expect it and can’t handle a world that doesn’t live up to those expectations.

I wanted to be your friend – oh, I wanted it so much more than you may ever know, but you made it impossible. You expected things I could never give, you saw me as something I never was or never would be.

Sure, I understand what you were trying to say last year by the portrait hole - that you see me as separate from all the ‘mudbloods’ out there, you see me separate because I’m not just ‘a’ mudblood, I’m ‘your’ mudblood, and that’s something altogether different. That’s special, and beautiful. That’s something outside what those Death Eater friends of yours despise so much. That’s something you’ve put up on some sort of a bloody pedestal. Well, you know what Severus?! I don’t especially relish in being viewed as anyone’s mudblood thank-you very much, and your feelings for me don’t negate the fact that you seem to think it bloody brilliant to try and reach your almost undeniable potential in life by aligning yourself with the kind of people who would always view me as nothing more than common, and debased, and infected and wrong, and would always look down on you for craving such filth.

Do you want to know something else shocking? Do you?!

I LOVE YOU!

There, how’s that?

It fairly tore my heart in half when you called me what you did. I knew you were sitting outside that portrait hole all day waiting for me to come out and the only reason that I didn’t come out there, the only reason I left you sitting there all those long hours was because I didn’t trust myself to not forgive you yet again, and I knew that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

There was something in your tone that day, something in your eyes that I had never seen before. Oh, you had lashed out at me in your pain before, and I had tried to take it in stride as much as I could, but something…something that day made me realize that something had shifted inside of you. You weren’t the boy I had met all those years before. You weren’t the boy I had learned to love. You were someone else entirely, and the person you were becoming wasn’t someone I could follow.

You probably think I didn’t care a mite for you that night you came to apologize, that it was easy for me to brush you off the way I did, that I just marched back through that portrait hole with a smile of relief on my face and flopped down on the sofa by the fire to share a butterbeer with Potter and co., but nothing could be further from the truth. You ask Mary McDonald if you don’t believe me. I cried in private for a week. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes I still can’t.

I worry about you Sev, all the time. I hear all the stories that filter down through the scholarly grapevine. They’re starting to say that you are planning on taking ‘the mark’. Some say that you have taken it already. Merlin help you if you do, Severus, and Merlin help all of us as well.

I’ve no doubt that you will excel at anything you set your hand to. It frightens me that very soon, I might wake up to discover that you have become my enemy, that we might be forced to face one another in the political arena or the battlefield one day (they say a war is coming).

Sometimes I wake screaming from nightmares in which I have been the cause of your death, in which my duty to the side I have chosen necessitates my betrayal of you. At times I am the one who actually does it. I look into your eyes as I kill you, and then I wake up nauseous, and inconsolable.

Mary worries. She says perhaps I’m going mad. I see her whispering and conspiring with Potter when she thinks I’m not looking. Apparently, like every other girl in Gryffindor, she seems to think that he will be the panacea for all my woes. She’s too dim to see that he only makes things worse. Sometimes I think Remus understands, but he just hands me a piece of that chocolate he’s always carrying around with him and keeps his silence, as is his way, and I am left to figure a way out of this hell for myself.

And it is hell Severus, but not the scorching lake of brimstone your father used to try and frighten you with, no, this hell is just a cold, dark emptiness; a place without the soft, sweet, silver light of your friendship, a place in which I find you only to have you die again, and again, and again in a million different ways that I cannot stop. You die to my heart, and my soul and my mind, and a little piece of all of these dies in me too, every time. Every single time I hear a new rumor, a rumor I know is true about something that occurred - how you had been there, how you had a part in it. Who are you? What are you becoming?

There won’t be an end to this hell, will there Severus? It will just go on and on, and when war comes, which I am certain it must, things will just get worse.

I thought that in casting you off last year, I might do us both a favor; end it quickly and oh so painfully, like tearing off a bandage in one quick rip; pain for a short time and then its over. But I was wrong. This is a pain that just goes on and on, every day more excruciating than the one before…

Do you feel it too, I wonder? All I can think of some days is what I can possible do to make it stop. Just for even a few minutes. I try to lose myself in stupid things – feigned interest in Quidditch, taking every advantage to go into Hogsmeade on the weekends, extracurricular this and extra credit that…. all of it hopeless. I’ve even given up on trying to fight off Potter. At least sitting in Rosmerta’s in Hogsmeade listening to him prattle on about Quidditch ad nauseum is better than sitting alone in my dormitory thinking about you and what you might be thinking - doing.

God I miss you Sev.

I’m so sorry for everything, and then again, I’m not. I just wish that the world was a different place, that there was no choosing of sides, no constant battle over blood status and magical supremacy, no reason why we should not and could not be friends. But that is not the world we live in, is it, and you have chosen your side and I have chosen mine, and so good-bye must be good-bye, and somehow, some way, I am going to have to find a way to let you go…

Your friend - Always,

Lily