Chapter Text
A decade past her Hogwarts days, Lily Potter looked into the face of the Bloody Baron. As he had always done, the gaunt ghost stared through her.
“Good evening, sir,” she said quietly. “Could you please escort me to Severus Snape?”
The Baron inclined his head and drifted through the dungeons, a half-step before her. Nothing about Hogwarts seemed to have changed, although after a thousand years, she supposed little adjustment could be needed. The torches, the stones, the windows to the lake--all that she lacked was a short, sallow-skinned boy tugging at her sleeve.
At a dark wooden door, the Baron paused. For a moment, it seemed as if he might say something, but then he bowed shallowly and left. She knocked, shivering at the sound of his chains scraping against the floor.
After a moment, the door swung open, and Lily found she had to look up to face Severus for the first time in her life. His skin was pale with dark shadows under his eyes; his black hair was pulled back, with silver at the temples. She glanced at his neck, but his high collar covered all. For a moment, his eyes widened and his lips parted, but his face relaxed into blankness as he stepped away from her.
“Mrs. Potter,” he said coolly, “I am in the middle of a delicate brew. Is it urgent?”
She considered him and then said carefully, “It's not time-sensitive. However, if you think it would not interfere with your work, I would appreciate...” She trailed off, fighting the urge to shrug. “You know yourself best, Severus.”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Diplomatic as ever. Can I assume you've been worrying over this for months?”
She felt her back relax. “Am I so obvious?”
He raised an eyebrow, whirled, and strode to the center of the small potions lab. Following, she watched the straight line of his spine, the slow swing of his hair, and thought about the stilted, awkward boy he’d been. So unconscious of the world, once.
With the ease of long practice, he pulled a dragon-hide apron over his frock coat, pulled his hair through the neck loop where it had caught, and tied the apron strings behind his back. She knew, without looking, that the bow would be perfect. “It is genuinely difficult, although I have nearly finished tonight’s dose. Stay at least a meter back; if I ask you to be silent, listen.”
As he pulled on his gloves, she reviewed the ingredients. “Wolfsbane?”
His hands stilled. “Yes,” he said, tugging on the second glove. “One of the castle inhabitants requires it.”
“I thought you taught Defense?”
Severus sneered as he removed the stasis charm from the potion and began to stir widdershins. “As if I would allow that dunderhead they hired to make anything more complex than boil cure.” He looked up at her from beneath his brow. “Surely you didn't come to discuss my career?”
Lily watched as he slowly added a level scoop of powdered belladonna; as it dissolved, the surface shimmered. “I have questions about two things. One from fifth year, one from the war.”
He did not look up from the cauldron. “Not particularly revealing on either count.”
“Sirius let something slip… That he sent you to Remus.”
His hand twitched as he reached for the next ingredient, but he added the dried asphodel petal by petal. “Yes,” he said softly.
“When you were first turned, you tried to tell me they had done something,” Lily said.
“When I was first turned,” Severus started, then pressed his lips together. “If you doubted me, I'm sure you had reason.”
"I'm not perfect, and I definitely wasn't at fifteen."
He frowned at the potion. "Did it ever occur to you that I wouldn't want to talk about becoming a monster?"
She blinked. "Werewolves aren't monsters."
"Assuredly," he sneered. "Lupin is a lapdog, and Potter is a saint. I should be grateful, I..." He snapped his mouth shut.
She stepped closer. “You still hate them, then. What made you change your mind?”
He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Move back, please.”
His voice was so much lower now, a rumbling bass.
She moved back.
"You can't just..." Then he shook his head. After a moment, he said slowly, “I am not like you, Lily. Ideals, causes, they seem like so much air.”
“Yet you spied for the Order.”
Severus did not reply. After turning off the heat, he kept stirring, adding a clockwise stir every so often until the color dulled to lead. He tipped the bottle of essence of aconite so that it emptied drop by drop.
“Was it to repay your life debt to James?”
Tendrils of blue smoke wafted up from the cauldron, curling around his neck, veiling his face. “No, I still owe it.”
She blinked. “How could you work for two years and still…”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!”
He ladled the potion into a goblet, smiled bitterly, and drank it down. “The Dark Lord has been dead for seven years; I have been a werewolf for thirteen. Why should any of it bother you now?”
“I need to understand,” she said.
He sighed, repacked the ingredients, vanished the rest of the mess, removed his gloves. After he untied his apron, removed it, and hung it on a hook, he met her gaze. “Regulus Black disappeared, and I was afraid. I tried to make myself necessary to my master and, in the process, did something unforgivable.” He shifted and looked away. “My spying was an attempt to undo it.”
She frowned. “Less forgivable than joining the Death Eaters? It was hardly a social club, Severus.”
His glittering black eyes snapped to hers. “Yes.”
Lily looked at his hands. "After I finished with Sirius, I cornered Remus. He said that James never stopped, when it came to you.”
Severus set the last ingredient in his brown leather bag, shut it, and locked it with a wordless spell. "If you want me to defend Potter," he drawled, "I'm afraid you will die unsatisfied."
"Did you think I knew?"
He picked up the bag and reviewed his work area. "I am sure that much of what I thought is not worth repeating. That child is gone." With the way he said 'child,' it should have been a curse. Seeming cool and unconcerned, he added, "Does he hurt you?"
With a jolt she remembered Mrs. Snape, quiet and fine-boned and always covered, even in summer. "No." She swallowed as two different James Potters filled the room. One was fifteen and terrible, spoiled and cruel; one was twenty-nine and generous, loving and brash. One was a tormentor, an enemy; one was a defender, a partner.
A tightness eased from his face. He nodded.
She pulled in a breath. "My first-born, Harry, will be at Hogwarts in a few years. He looks like his dad."
"Fascinating."
"Will you be--that is, will it bother you? Teaching him?"
"Mrs. Potter," he started, then stopped. He looked down at his hands, flexing them against the case, and a line formed between his eyebrows. He said slowly, "Lily. There is only one thing I require, and that need is met. I will never be a gentle or patient man, but I am content." He picked up the case and gestured her toward the door. A moment after she started walking, he followed. "I find that a great many things can be borne when one has simple needs."
Lily swallowed, aware that she was a Muggle-born witch with her back to an ex-Death-Eater, a werewolf the night before the full moon, a boy who had been her best friend. "All right." Once past the threshold, she turned to face him as nonchalantly as she could.
The lights of the lab were out, leaving him in shadow. His eyes glowed gold, reflecting the torches on the wall behind her. He blinked and looked down the corridor.
"Do you know the way out?"
"Yes," she said, certain she knew the shape of the maze.
He nodded and walked past her, turning left where she would turn right. The empty stone halls amplified the click of his heels so that she heard him long after he had left her sight.