Bittersweet

Bittersweet

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me
Saying that now you are not as you were
- The Voice, Thomas Hardy

It's her great tragedy: she will never know what happened.

He wonders, sometimes (no, often, serrated rusting knife-sharp often) whether she saw her end coming. Was it a surprise, slipping past her guard soft as a caress, or did she see the green light aimed so easily at her heart and feel fear, terror, denial...?

Only one person knows. Snape does not dare ask him. Not because he's afraid for himself - his fear has dripped away through the years like rainwater upon stone until he is worn away, until he's nothing but slivers. Nor because he's afraid for others - she's beyond fear, after all, and nothing much matters past that.

But because he knows it would bring the Dark Lord pleasure.

Voldemort likes to feel the reflected glow of others' grief, perhaps because he cannot feel it himself. Under his eyes, which are cherry-red as a forge, Snape is pinned, his emotions up for dissection. The past is magnified, intensified: it is all too raw and too fresh. He would become nothing but a vivisected laboratory rat, pulled apart for the Dark Lord's cold curiosity.

And so he keeps the past shut away and silent. He says the words he needs to, moves as he must. His strategy is complex, his end-game simple. Harry Potter must live. It is the price of her sacrifice.

~*~

It's her great triumph: she will never grow old.

Snape doesn't think she would have cared much. Her beauty was that artless, wild sort that blazes briefly, phoenix-beauty, that is gone with as much glory as it came and leaves behind scars and strength. He finds her in the oddest places - in the red tumbling autumn leaves and the soft steam of truth potions (not love potions, which are lies and wishful thinking).

And of course, in the hatred of Harry Potter's green eyes. So too did she look at him towards the end, when she spoke with such uninformed scorn of dark magic and dark wizards.

Her eyes stare out from her son. There too, she is evergreen, never to die or age as mere mortals must.

So beneath Harry's glares, he feels old and ugly, Grendel facing Beowulf. All he has become is revealed under such scrutiny: treacherous, angry, bitter, lonely. He sees the lines at his eyes and mouth, the potion stains on his fingers, the jagged edge of his smile.

And he sees her. Always, he sees her - flickering and translucent, a girl as slender as a weeping willow. She's tangled in his hair, steeping in his potions, colouring his Slytherin heart green with envy, adding acid to the Slytherin silver of his tongue.

He loves her, and so he hates Harry Potter, who wears Lily's love in a lightning scar on his forehead and who is the doppelganger of the man she chose instead. Snape protects him with savage ferocity, to show his love is greater, to show her that she should have died for him, as he would have done for her.

As he will do, eventually.

~*~

It's his great tragedy: that he'll always know how it could have happened.

He runs it over in his mind. If he had never said that word (Mudblood, when he meant I love you, the two interchangeable under his father's belt and his mother's bruises), that last fragile link would not have broken. Perhaps he would have refused to try that stupid spell. He wouldn't have been so angry. He wouldn't have been so hurt.

Voldemort's gentle words would not have slid through his guard as easily as his curse slid through Lily's skin.

He would never have been good shining noble true (Potter) but he might have been a little different. Dark magic might have become black humour. Dumbledore would have looked at him with wariness, but not contempt. Lily would still have defended him, if wearily.

And that thing with Potter, that hungry teenage transient thing, would have ended. Of that Snape is sure. She had a way of seeing through to the heart of a matter, and a man, of piercing the illusions and the lies, and he is certain that Potter's pomp and arrogance would have frustrated her eventually.

Or perhaps it's what he needs to believe. That somewhere, it could have been more than this.

Because otherwise, it's too painful to think about.

Otherwise, it's the surly insolence of Potter and the merciless cold of her stare, it's the nights spent in a draughty room wondering when it will all end while mildew forms on the walls, it's slick lies rolling off his tongue like poison, it's watching sunrise the colour of Felix and feeling that the light can't reach him. Otherwise, he was only ever a turncoat, and he was only ever a Slytherin and all these bright broken rainbow-shining pieces inside him were no more than a child's leftover delusions.

Otherwise, she could never have loved him.

~*~

It's his great triumph: that he'll never grow any older.

He's never feared his death. It seemed like a trinket after Lily was gone. He threw it to her cause - to her son - knowing what that meant.

And so he gazes up at Potter, who looks back and for the first time, Snape cannot see Lily in his eyes. Instead, he sees what he missed all along: a boy, who has been scared lonely angry wretched lying arrogant cruel (me), who is nearly a man, and will have his life taken from him in the instant that it has become most precious.

He cannot take back his words. He only hopes - for the first time - that his actions will speak more loudly, so he breathes his last into his memories.

"Take it."

Potter has a look of horror on his face. Snape wants to tell him that it's a little late to be squeamish, but he has no time for such fripperies.

"Take it," he insists. Death rattles in his throat, burns in his blood. It hurts, but he feels more alive than he ever has. It's over at last, and all the bright broken rainbow-shining pieces inside him are lighting up like stars.

He sees all he has forgotten as it leaves him...

Laughing behind the hedge, silly spells and jokes. The swing, him pushing her so high that she screeched, the sun flashing bright on the chains.

The crackling fires in Hogwarts, and not feeling hungry. Lush feather duvets and lazy chatter before falling into deep sleep. His House crowding around him, wanting him, pulling him into their talk. The cosy feeling of secrets. Potions that smelt like summer and fizzed like sherbet and changed the world a little bit, one bit at a time.

Her hair rain-wet and dark as blood, her smile wide. Puzzled looks from both their houses, arguments over homework.

And the face of her child, who will meet his last battle because Snape has kept him alive, because of a four-letter word that he didn't know he knew.

And as he fades, without regret, he pleads, "Look at me," and his vision blurs.

She's there. Lily Evans hovers above him, hair a dishevelled red cloud over her shoulders, her gaze far more deadly than a snake's fangs. But she smiles like there is a secret only they two know, and she holds out her hand. If there are others there, he does not see them yet.

Where she is, he is. That's enough.

But she fades, leaving nothing but eyes green as luck, and he is left grasping for her, for this woman who is always like smoke in his hand. But he has learned another four-letter word, dying on his tongue with the intensity of a curse.

Hope.

It's his last thought: that there is a great journey ahead upon this strange shadowed path, and one day he may find her, and they will walk together once again, in tragedy and in triumph.

~*~