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Thought we had the time, had our lives
Now you’ll never get older, older.
Didn’t say goodbye, now I’m frozen in time
Getting colder, colder.
One last word.
One last moment.
To ask you why
you left me here behind.
Michael Schulte, You Said You’d Grow Old With Me
Sometimes, he imagines Lily’s death. Often enough that, when it happens, one part of him thinks he caused it simply because he thought of it so often.
He imagines the scene like this: She gets hurt, perhaps during a Death Eater attack, or a duel. He bursts into the house the Order dragged her into, away from the line of fire, rips his mask off his face, and watches her bleed out on someone’s polished wooden floors. He would sob, he thinks, and maybe even hold her. He imagines her red hair splayed across the floorboards, mingling with the darker, tackier blood. He imagines everyone’s scandalised expressions, how they would look at him – the monster, the traitor – when they finally realise how much he loves. In some of his daydreams, Lily is conscious enough to acknowledge him, to forgive him. Sometimes, when he is lonely and feeling so very, very broken, she even tells him she loved him, once. He thinks about how those with her might react – the cast of the play changes daily – but mostly, he imagines himself on his knees, head bowed, weeping.
In some of his daydreams, he is too late. He arrives at the Potter’s residence after the fact. They try to keep him away, try to stun him. Sometimes, he imagines how they try to restrain him bodily, but he would push them aside, wild and ferocious in his pain, in his grief. He imagines, again, falling to his knees at her deathbed, or by the table they had barred her up on. He imagines holding her hand, her skin still bleeding out the warmth. He imagines a hush falling over the room when they see his heart, bared to her, to them all. He imagines falling apart.
Sometimes, he imagines the funeral. Imagines Potter approaching him with pain and grudging acknowledgement written on his face. He would hand Severus a letter, and it would be written in Lily’s hand. She wanted you to have this, he would say, in case she couldn’t make it. Severus would open it with shaking hands, and inside would be reassurances, judgements, forgiveness, anger and love.
It is no surprise that in the end, it goes very differently.
In his daydreams, it feels like a wave of pain, an enormous, roaring wall of fire.
In reality, it is like this: Dumbledore, stopping him in a corridor in Hogwarts. Severus felt something , of course, from the moment it happened. Like a void, the absence of an itch in his left forearm. He is not surprised when Dumbledore says those words: Tom is dead.
He feels both at once, then – exaltation and pure, unadulterated terror. Without the Dark Lord, what is his purpose? How can he buy his place here?
But there is more. He can tell in the way Dumbledore looks at him. Almost, he thinks, in pity, and his stomach sinks.
Let us talk in my office.
In his daydreams, Lily’s death tears him to pieces. He rages, he screams and cries, cursing the world and anyone who comes close.
In reality, it is this: He knows, even before he is told. Not in words, not in something as tangible as feelings. But he knows.
There is a special tone, Severus learned, that people use when they tell you of death.
So he is told. And inside him, a chasm opens. It feels deeper than a million feet. He can see it, dark and narrow, cold and deep. He feels something fall into it, fall and fall and never hit the ground.
These are his feet.
These are his hands.
This is his heart – racing, for some reason, in his throat.
He twitches his cold fingers. Time turns to molasses in front of him.
“Alright,” he says. “I see.”
He already knows: He will remember this moment for as long as he lives.
He goes by the house later.
It is funny, he thinks, as he walks up to it. How he is walking, breathing, even talking. Almost, he thinks, as if he is still a person.
Every step on the pavement feels as if he is walking on paper, spanned across an abyss. He is floating, he is dragging himself.
One step.
Another step.
Another, he tells himself, one more.
Lily lies on the floor. As if tossed. Crumpled like a napkin.
Mechanically, he rearranges her so she lies straight. James, too. He can feel his hatred for the man scratch at the inside of his skin, but it cannot not penetrate it. Nothing can.
Severus is ice. He is stone.
He lets him lie there and goes to Lily again.
She is stone, too.
Carefully, he folds himself into a sitting position next to her. His hands feel as if they are shaking, but they are not. He can barely feel the ground beneath him.
He never realised how much a person can feel as if they are cast in stone. Her skin is soft over marble. Her hair is soft, a parody of a living thing.
He kisses her forehead. A secret, he thinks, between them.
He should have done it in life.
My fault, he thinks. Mine.
It should have been me.
He lives from a moment to the next. There is no tomorrow, there is no next hour. There is only this breath. Then the next. In-between, the commands to his own body – move there, take this, walk here. As if he is under imperius. His own captor.
Then the next breath.
In his dreams, she is not dead.
Over and over, over and over, over and over again he explains it to her – You have died, Lily. You were killed, Lily. You have to understand – you are dead, Lily.
It was my fault, Lily.
But she always comes back.
He settles at Hogwarts. Dumbledore wants to keep him around. Why, he cannot fathom, what is his use now? But he takes it, clings to it with both hands for a reason he himself cannot comprehend. Where else can he go, where else can he suffer like this? Hogwarts is a guarantor of pain. It takes his breath, his energy, his time, and it gives him memory after memory, reminder after reminder of what he has lost. Of what he has done.
Some days, he nearly screams it. I didn’t know, I didn’t know .
It fills him, resonates in his bones. He imagines breaking down at Dumbledore’s feet, weeping, screaming I did not know, I swear, I am just a boy, I’m not even a man yet, please, I would never have wanted this, never her I d i d n o t m e a n t o, p l e a s e –
He does not. He takes Dumbledore’s orders, his disgust, with a bowed head.
I deserve this, he thinks, every word of it.
He chases the memory of Lily down abandoned corridors.
Some nights, he thinks he killed her just by imagining it.
Why did you dream of it, he asks himself, spitting venom, why did you imagine it if you did not want it? How sick, how twisted must you be, to wish death on those you should treasure most. You monster, you twisted, perverse, guilty, abhorrent man–
He does not cry anymore.
Days pass so slowly, he hardly realises it’s been a year. Except, of course, there is no way he can forget. He sees the day approach like a physical thing, like a second Reaper in the distance. He cannot look away.
He visits her grave for the first time on her birthday. It must have snowed – the world is white. He doesn’t wear gloves, not even a scarf. He stands in the snow, hands numb, feet numb, heart numb, and stares down at the stone.
The last enemy that shall be defeated is death.
“You didn’t defeat shit,” he says. His nails bite into his palms. His teeth bite into his tongue.
Oh, how he hates being alive.
The days race past. The years crawl. Before he can blink, he is old.
He knows this isn’t age like Dumbledore’s. His hair is devoid of any trace of white. His wrinkles, little they may be, originate from frowning, not from age. But his stomach hurts more often than not, and so does his back. When he thinks of her, and he thinks of her often, his throat burns and stings as if he had swallowed nails. He knows that something has broken in him, or maybe something has broken in the world. Neither of them are the same, now, and they grow apart.
He still wakes at night, dreaming of her. He is so grateful, so grateful for it. At least like this, he hasn’t lost her fully.
He stole a letter she wrote – he knows it was wrong, he knows, but he could not help it. He needed it, needed some reminder that she existed, needed something she had held to curl around when the pain presses his head down and the tears will not come.
He takes it out sometimes. To look at. To feel the pain. He embraces it.
It relieves him, in a way. He feels more alive, then. Closer to her then than he ever was in life.
It is his penance, he knows. The guilt, the pain, it is the only currency he can attempt to repay her in, now.
In this way, it is almost a relief to hear of the Dark Lord’s return.
He throws himself into his duties. He does not fear death, he does not fear pain. Death visits him every night, pain clings to him all day. He takes it all, invites it in.
He keeps the boy alive.
He falters. Of course he does. It is days, months, years, eternities and eternities following each other like beads on a necklace, each longer than the last. He stumbles and he falls. He is made of anger, of bitterness, of the desperate, desperate wish to be elsewhere, to be free .
Would death grant him this freedom? He does not know, but he likes to imagine.
It is then, in those moments – sitting in front of his unlit fire, or sometimes, sitting in front of his lit hearth, staring down into the bubbling mass in his cauldron, walking to breakfast, watching his porridge reflect the ceiling’s candlelight, staring at Potter’s cursed, blasted eyes (the first time he saw them, he ran for the bathrooms, sure he was to vomit his guts out, only for nothing, nothing at all to come up) – that he reminds himself that he made a promise.
Penance. Payment.
I will pay. I will not die. I will do everything I can to keep this promise, at least. I will live for this, if I must.
And he jolts himself back into movement. Draws, somehow, some energy from inside himself. Keeps walking, speaks, because he must. He promised.
The fact that Lily had never born witness to any such vow changes nothing at all.
Death, when it comes, comes with fangs.
There is a relief in pain. Its sting is physical. The blood gushes out as if it had been ready to do so for weeks, months, years. Severus feels, for the first time in years, true relief.
He gives his memories to the boy, gives them gladly. He watches life seep out of the world around him – or is it seeping out of him? – and with every drop of blood on the filthy floor, he feels lighter.
Penance. Payment.
I wonder if I will see her.
It was a thought born of dark nights. He has wondered, then – will they meet again? Is there an otherworld, a place to go where he can do as he has dreamed and crumple down at her feet, finally free of other gazes, finally free of all the things that have kept him standing?
He does not dare wish for it. Does not dare hope.
Sometimes, though, it sneaks up on him. And he wonders how she would greet him.
Most days, he is sure of her dislike, her distaste – but there are others, both his weakest and strongest moments, when he thinks that there might be forgiveness.
She loved him once. He knows that now, with the distance of the years. He knows the signs, knows the way she looked at him. Some days, he can almost see it, almost taste it, almost feel what he felt then, before he knew what it had been. Still, he knows it was there, even on days when he cannot see it.
At least he thinks so. Thought so.
The human memory is such a fickle thing. Is it all in his head? Did she even exist, or did he make her up, too, did he make up all of it?
I will find out now .
But death is nothing but blackness.
And I’ve just found out
That life is a goddamn miracle.
And the ending is a song.
And there are a lifetime of words that I could say.
But I got none.
Tom Rosenthal, My Life is a Song for You