Awakening

AWAKENING

Author: Sky Samuelle

Summary: A summer interlude between Lily and Severus after their falling out. One shot. Spoilers for DH.

He called her Mudblood and she spent the remaining of their fifth year trying to find the right balance between publicly ignoring him and talking to him when strictly necessary, without being overly hostile or overly friendly. Not the easiest thing to do with someone you were around for a large slice of your life.

On the spur of her self-righteous indignation, Lily didn't truly miss him until summer.

Spending summer together was a routine, nothing more or less. Without Severus Snape around - his neat streak in organizing their homework so they would finish it months before they had to and work on something else, his caustic remarks on her sister, his enthusiastic digging in his mother's library - it was dull and boring.

One day she went to the river where they had played often as children and he was there, a thick, well-worn book on his knees. His gaze didn't rise to meet hers.

"I knew you were bound to pass by sooner or later," he said, his voice cool as water, so damned soft and smooth.

"We can't be friends only during the summer," she remarked, and Severus still wouldn't stop his stupid reading and look at her face.

"I'm not the one who wanted it this way."

"Yes, you are!"

Her vehemence distracted him finally and he looked up, his obsidian eyes probing hers with shameless suspicion, as if he actually doubted her sincerity.

"It's you, with your interest in morbid spells and dark rituals," Lily remarked, hotly first, then more slowly and deliberately. "It's you, pretending you don't see me when you hang around loathsome people who make a show of despising me and others of my birth."

"It's not as if your friends like me any better." On his sullen visage there was no trace of guilt or self-doubt. Didn't he understand it, or didn't he want to understand?

"It's different! They aren't building up propaganda to deny your right to exist."

"Oh, I'm sure. Ask Potter if he shares your feelings."

As always, reading the nuances of his voice was easier than interpreting his facial expression; more often than not, Severus' visage went utterly blank when he was distressed. Yet she could sense the sudden, hard edge in his inflection when his lips pronounced the other boy's last name more clearly than if she had seen it.

He closed his book with a determined, distinct snap, putting it aside on the ground with deliberate care. It figured: their first real conversation in weeks, if not months, and he was wasting it already, bringing into it people she was only associated with because she shared their House.

"Potter is no friend of mine."

Severus' back stiffened visibly for a few seconds before his stance fluidly relaxed. While his dark, probing gaze found and seized her again, Lily had a chance to dread whatever he was about to say.

"Forgive me, I had forgotten: for you a friend is seemingly someone whose public humiliation you can use to further your flirtation with a bully you claim to despise!"

She expected a low blow...but not this. Never this. She stayed pinned under the intensity of the mute accusation in his bottomless eyes, her mouth hanging open for an undetermined time before she could reply. "You - I honestly have no idea what you're going on about."

Severus' pale cheeks flushed instantly and his teeth clenched in frustration, as if what he had to say was very unpleasant.

Lily would have given anything to have a Time-Turner in her hands and to be able to replay this scene from the very beginning, so she could see exactly where everything had gone so wrong.

"You were there," Severus articulated slowly, "when that 'arrogant toerag' hung me upside down, insulting me in front of all of Hogwarts, and you smiled along with everyone else. You sided with them - and then you refuse to forgive me for a single slip of the tongue?"

Although his tone never rose above a politely conversational one, it felt like she had just been slapped. Hard. Screams would probably have been less offensive than this unnatural chilliness, but then Severus had always claimed to despise those who had to resort to violence, physical or verbal, to get their desserts.

When did he get to be the victim? Lily felt fury invading her, gradually replacing the shocked numbness.

"You slipped in a racial slur! Must I still listen to you denying that you believe all the rubbish most of your exclusive company spews? And I defended you then! I even waited until I was sure nobody from your House would intervene on your behalf, because Merlin forbid Severus Snape should get his face saved by a silly Gryffindor girl; his pride couldn't bear it! So don't come to me playing the victim, even if I smiled at an inappropriate moment."

She should apologize for that, but it felt sort of like that would diminish everything else she'd just said. So much for having his self-control.

Severus' onyx eyes narrowed predatorily at her and he smirked slowly, the same way he used to do when he anticipated externalizing a particularly vitriolic opinion.

"Slytherins understand peer pressure, Lily. If you smiled at an inappropriate moment -" he mocked her with a merciless, bloodless passion halfway between regret and cold anger - "it was because you enjoyed being on the winning team. Just like you enjoy fancying yourself the princess who reformed the Frog Prince."

Lily clenched her eyes shut, hating with all that she was the way he made her supposed reasons sound so real and yet so filthy. Menial.

Filthy Mudblood. I don't need help from a filthy little Mudblood.

Even while the ghost of those words pulled at the edges of her memory, she could not deny that Severus was at least partly right. Her Gryffindor girlfriends never understood why she orbited around that odd, mean-looking Slytherin boy; they never understood that she still wasn't even marginally interested in boys (duh, at her age!), either. The Iron Virgin, Sirius tactlessly called her when James wasn't around.

James Potter...he was all her female acquaintances talked about, but he paid them no attention. So yes, it gratified her vanity when it looked as if she had some power - real or imaginary - over him.

But she would have been just fine not knowing about it...or at least without knowing that Severus knew. It was really unnerving how well he managed to read her while keeping himself shielded behind his barricades unless he decided otherwise.

"Maybe you shouldn't have expected better from a disgusting Muggleborn."

Lily sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep it from trembling, looking down because she had no idea what to do. Half of her just wanted her best friend back; the other half distrusted this weird, possessive sort of friendship where she never seemed to be in control. Both halves were beginning to fear his fascination with things which either horrified or scared her.

She pretended she didn't feel him sneaking up closer until the weight of his hand on her shoulder made it impossible to ignore his closeness.

"I could never think of you as disgusting." Sev's velvety whisper behind her melted away some of her tension, even as the warmth of his breath on her earlobe gave her a new tingly sensation.

But what about the thousand others like me? Lily was about to reply, just before her gaze rose to meet his.

But then silence lingered because her universe slowed down and somehow she realized his lips were caressing hers. She wasn't sure who started first; they were slipping so much closer to each other and it wasn't sudden. She didn't know what she was doing, sliding her tongue inside his mouth and urging his head down, but it was truly a shame that he was so much taller than she because it forced her to cling to him, pressing their bodies too tightly together.

After a while, the alien warmth of this threatening tangle of limbs and tongues became too much; a need to pull away overcame her and Lily pushed Severus away a bit roughly.

"Sorry," he muttered and she understood it was he who had started the kiss. The discovery upset her; he wasn't supposed to want her like this, the same way Potter and other boys at school did. Severus was her best friend. Maybe he was like them in other ways as well - maybe he wasn't interested in her friendship any more.

"I hate the person you've become,"

Lily lashed out, regretting it even before the line rolled past her lips. She didn't mean it, she was certain. She wanted to assure him of this as she witnessed a mercurial whiplash of hurt and humiliation crossing his features, but her brain must have been either dead or in sensory overload because she noticed that she didn't know what she meant at all.

While Sev collected his book and leaves, she couldn't shake herself out of the helplessness that paralyzed her. It wasn't until she was back home, within the safe boundaries of her bedroom and under the protective confinement of her covers, that she realized what she had really wanted to say was:

I don't understand the person you've become, and I hate that. Do I know you? Do I fear you? Love you?