Work Text:
„In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.
Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke."
Ann Finch, Samhain
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53066/samhain
Annie Finch, "Samhain" from Eve, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Annie Finch.
Severus Snape had never considered himself a particularly gentle or sensitive man ‒ or so he believed. That “never” conveniently encompassed the stretch of time the Potions Master deigned to remember.
The older he grew, the more acutely aware he became of the hollow, washed-out state of his life. It wasn’t that he had ever truly felt comfortable in his own skin, nor that hope had often visited the calloused chambers of his heart ‒ not since Lily Evans had turned her back on him. And yet, as the years passed, Severus Snape seemed to dwindle into a shadow of the man he had once been: consumed by a sorrow difficult to define, haunted by ghosts of the past, and increasingly afraid of the time that remained to him. Time that, in one breath, felt oppressively long, and in the next, terrifyingly short.
He was a man who, in the depths of his hypocrisy, believed himself to be someone who never fled from responsibility. In his own mind, he bathed daily ‒ even luxuriated ‒ in guilt and remorse. He lived, after all, like an ascetic: frugally, on the fringes of society; having forsaken the light and renounced the dark, he wandered perpetually in the twilight and fog. Alone, solitary, unmoved by the world around him.
Only phantoms accompanied him ‒ demons of his misdeeds. They haunted him by day and by night, crouched just beyond the edge of sight, threatening to drive him to the brink of madness.
He told himself he despised them. But the truth was, he feared them with a bone-deep, paralysing dread.
That fear came and went in waves, its severity dictated by season, mood, and the ever-changing tides of economic and social circumstance. And although Snape prided himself on being neither superstitious nor devout, there was one small chink in his sceptical armour: Samhain.
All Hallows’ Eve. The night when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest ‒ when, for a fleeting moment, it all but vanishes. A night on which anything might happen. Including the death of two innocent people ‒ the parents of a one-year-old child.
For twenty-nine consecutive years, Severus Snape had made a habit of keeping close to light on that night ‒ circling candles like a moth, stoking the hearth until the dungeons grew stifling and hot.
He was afraid ‒ afraid that should he stray into darkness even briefly, he might never find his way out again. Afraid that those he'd sent to their deaths would come for him at last. He feared they would be waiting: faceless shadows, people whose features he could scarcely recall. Even Albus Dumbledore would be among them. But above all, Lily and James Potter would be there too.
It was a fear he could not reason away, a terror lodged somewhere deep in his gut that returned, stronger and darker, year after year.
Have I not done enough? Have I not earned forgiveness? ‒ he asked himself again and again. Yet the answer was always the same, and never comforting.
Light ‒ humankind’s ancient companion. A manifestation of warmth, energy, safety, and good.
And Severus Snape, no matter how close he drew to it, always felt he stood on the wrong side of the flame ‒ not bathed in its glow, but trapped within the long, sorrowful shadow it cast.
Snape yearned for all the things contained in the crackle of a fire, in the sparks that danced upwards into the night.
He felt homeless, invisible, passed over by every earthly mercy, and yet ‒ when it came to misfortune ‒ he had no need to wait his turn. It always found its way to him, barging in uninvited.
He felt the chill of death on his skin, cold fingers brushing his neck... but as if through mist...
Everything in his life, since that monstrous night nearly three decades earlier, had been half-lived, barren, stripped of meaning. Neither good nor evil. As though he were trapped behind the dusty glass of some forgotten shop window, catching only faint echoes of the real world, of real sensation.
And so, one October day, in the year he turned fifty, Severus Snape had had enough. Enough of fleeing, of fear, of glancing over his shoulder. Enough of half-truths, of existing among the ghosts of the past. He had reached the midpoint ‒ the place, symbolically at least, where his life ought to have reached full bloom ‒ and yet, he felt as if he were dying from within, buried alive. Snape resolved to face it once and for all; gathering what strength remained to him, he decided that only confrontation could bring him the freedom he had so long ‒ and painfully ‒ ripened towards.
Freedom was no simple word to him. He had not been raised in it, nor had he walked through life arm in arm with it. That is why, now, as he extinguished the candles in his house on Spinner’s End one by one, his fingers trembling with fear, his face fixed in a mask of grim resolve, he was all in: whatever price he must pay for facing the dark, he would not turn back.
He sat in the middle of an empty, desolate room ‒ filled only with his own bitterness, teetering piles of books, and the lingering stench of cheap tobacco.
Outside, the sun was setting slowly. Dusk cast its ashen cloak over the weary walls of the old house. The stairs had creaked more than once. But no one came.
The sun dipped below the horizon, and Severus Snape felt the moment sear inside his skull like a burning flash.
Something shifted. Something moved. And the room, dim though it had been, was suddenly swallowed by oppressive darkness.
A creak on the stairs. The snap of the front door. A breath of wind, as though exhaled directly beside his ear. And silence.
No one came.
Snape changed his mind. He tried to rise ‒ his heart thudding madly in his chest, brittle and starved.
But he found himself trapped, heavy-limbed, unable even to lift a hand, let alone stand and flee.
A dry panic clawed at his throat.
Another crack. A hiss of wind, inexplicable in the cool, still night. The armchair faced the window. Through it, he saw tendrils of mist and ghostly vapour drifting over Spinner’s End, woven through with the faint laughter of children. But where were the street lamps? Where were the glowing pumpkins in windows and doorways? The world had vanished beneath a thick, sticky darkness that clung to his lashes and stretched over Cokeworth like a spider’s web, devouring even the lifeless pinpricks of starlight.
Then ‒ a gentle clatter, the patter of tiny hooves.
“Severus?”
He had to admit, he was disappointed.
Where were the terrors of his nightmares? Why had no bloodthirsty wraiths come for him? Instead, a few steps away, reflected in the windowpane, hovered the gentle, half-smiling face of Lily Evans.
Lily Potter, he reminded himself.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her once-chestnut hair, now made entirely of grey mist and moonlit silver. She stood behind him, but his neck was stiff, immobile. He swallowed with effort.
“Lily... I...”
“It’s all right. Hush now...” Her voice was that of someone soothing a child. She stroked his hair.
He felt nothing ‒ only saw it.
Moments later, another figure emerged.
James.
Bloody Prongs.
“What do you want?” Snape spat, coldly. “Is it not enough that I’m haunted by every memory of ‒ ”
“We’re not here to torment you,” said Potter.
“We’ve come to set you free,” Lily added.
He longed to turn and look at her face directly ‒ not just through the grimy window glass. But even if he could, would he see anything at all? Perhaps they were only figments of his mind, not true ghosts... He wanted, more than anything, to close his eyes and shut them out.
“Don’t dwell on that. It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “Wherever we come from, we’ve waited here ‒ year after year ‒ but your door was always closed to us...”
“After everything I’ve done...”
“Yes, after everything, Snivellus,” James said dryly. “You paid your debt. You saved our son.”
“You too deserve forgiveness.”
He shook his head.
He had expected punishment. He’d hoped for it. A man who cannot forgive, and has never been granted such grace, does not know what to do with it when it comes.
“Take me away from here,” he growled. “I don’t want pity. I want punishment. I want to be free.”
Lily looked at him with sadness in her ghostly eyes ‒ eyes that, to him, were as vividly green as ever.
“Freedom isn’t always pain and death, Sev.”
He winced. She had called him that ‒ like in the old days.
A low blow.
Tears trickled down the Potions Master’s cheeks.
“Let me atone for it. Don’t feed me this sentimental drivel, for Merlin’s sake!”
“You gave your soul to the devil in life, for years of service,” James said hollowly. “What greater price is there?”
Snape neither agreed nor denied.
“Severus... even if we wanted to...” Lily hesitated.
“Tell him, Lily.”
She sighed.
“All right.”
Her hair swayed like a silver tide.
“That night... that dreadful night... we weren’t the only victims. It was the same night, Severus.”
“The Night of Spirits,” Snape said, hoarsely.
“Yes, Severus. The Night of Spirits...”
“You have no idea how much...”
“Perhaps I do.”
He fell silent. He said nothing.
“You are neither here nor there,” she said at last.
“What does that mean, what kind of ‒ ”
“Your grief, your pain... the spirits of Samhain took you that night. You let them. You were the most vulnerable. And ever since, you haven’t truly lived. You couldn’t feel joy or redemption. You couldn’t love or be loved... You’ve been trapped between worlds ‒ and I’ve wanted to tell you, all this time...”
A spectral hand wiped away spectral tears. Severus Snape sat humbled by his own.
“It’s time, Severus,” her voice now echoed, distant and multiplied.
Another slam of the door.
Laughter, footsteps, hooves on wood. And then ‒ impenetrable darkness.
He didn’t know how long he wandered in it, until his fingers grazed something. The cold, damp condensation clung to his hand.
A doorknob.
He pressed it, but the door would not budge. Panic rising, he pounded, shouted, pleaded ‒
Light burst before him, brilliant and blinding, and the warmth from beyond the threshold made him realise his face was slick ‒ with sweat, with tears, or Merlin knew what else. Then a figure appeared: not very tall, but tremendously bushy-haired.
Was he dead? Was this one of the mythical angels?
“Professor Snape?” The angel’s voice, familiar and shocked, sobered him at once.
He sat, shaking, on the steps to someone’s home.
Her home.
“Granger,” he said grimly. “Might I... use your fireplace?”
She smiled and stepped aside to let him in.