Chapter Text
August 1981
Summer came hard to Cokeworth that year. What little life managed to grow there was limp and dry. Severus Snape had abandoned his heavy brewer’s robes in deference to the heat and wore only faded black corduroys and a grey henley with holes worn through the cuffs. It was too much clothing for the heat and too little for Severus’ preference. Certainly, the universe had never much cared for Severus’ comfort. He was an unusually bitter man for having lived only twenty-one years, but he had always been precocious when it came to misery. And he had more than enough to be miserable about.
The wretched Muggle house that was his inheritance leaned precariously at the end of the row. It was fitting, he would realize later in his life, that he should have been born on a dead-end street. The small iron gate that blocked the path to the front step was hung crooked and creaked ominously in the wind. Weeds overran the dark window and obscured the cracked panes of glass. Inside the house, books piled high on every conceivable surface- stacks on the floor, the couch, on the coffee table, under the coffee table. Books lined the narrow staircase and filled the cupboard. Having grown up in a house that was as devoid of food as it was of love, Severus Snape spent the first Galleon he ever earned on a book. If one goes without for long enough, some kinds of hunger fade. And others grow.
The one wall where there were no bookcases was bare but for the dusty outline of a cross that had once hung over the small fireplace, which was the only means by which to heat the house in winter. Not that there had ever been money for coal. Or anything else. Tobias Snape had spent every quid the family had on drink. Money came slowly since Tobias rarely left the pub for a shift at the mill. He drank, according to himself, because he had been tricked into marriage by his pagan witch of wife and begat with her a strange and unnatural son. As Severus grew in size, Tobias grew in faith. And his faith was a vicious thing.
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
And serve his Lord, Severus had. He had been brewing nonstop in the wretched heat to fulfill the Dark Lord’s demands before he started his position as Potions Master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which itself was nothing to look forward to. What he did have to look forward to was eviscerating the latest article written by some witless Potions Master who should have long ago retired from the difficult job of being alive and had no business publishing his moronic and patently wrong opinions on lacewing flies and valerian root.
His brief period of freedom wasn’t to last though.
When Severus received the note it felt like someone had vanished the organs and viscera from his body. The words echoed hollowly in the cavity that had, moments before, held a beating heart. His violently annotated copy of Dreaded Potions Monthly lay abandoned on the faded rug that graced the scuffed and stained living room floor of the last rowhouse located on a desolate and nameless lane in Spinner’s End. The folded parchment had not been delivered by owl, it had shot itself through the metal mail slot in the house’s peeling front door. While it might seem natural to some to receive mail via the mail slot, it was not so to a wizard. Mail had not been delivered in such a manner since his parents’ brutal and untimely death some three years before.
Despite its unusual method of arrival, he didn’t doubt the identity of the author for even a second. It said simply:
S,
Meet me at the park at 5pm.
And it was signed with a doodle of a lily.
He paced frantically back and forth over the bare earth in front of the tree that had, for many years, been “theirs”. It even said so. L + S carved into the trunk, right there. They had met under their tree at the park countless times from the age of seven until the winter before Severus ruined everything. Had he known then that in a few short months he would destroy the friendship that meant everything to him, he might have taken a moment to appreciate the way Lily’s red hair had contrasted with the white snow.
Upon receiving the note, he had walked out of his crooked front door onto the nameless lane and down to the park that marked the border between the “good” side of town and the “bad”, still clutching the small bit of parchment in one hand and his wand in the other. It was more than an hour before the stated meeting time. For this chance to see her again, Severus would wait under their tree eternally, eating leaves and dandelions and ignoring the summons of his many masters.
“You stupid fucking sod,” he muttered to himself. His emaciated corpse would be of little use to Lily. If suicide were an acceptable apology, he would have booked his cremation years ago.
Thankfully he didn’t have to test his commitment to melodrama. At the appointed time, she arrived. As Lily approached, the afternoon sun made a burning inferno of her hair. And she wasn’t alone. On her hip she carried a black-haired infant. Child of prophecy, fated for greatness. Or for death.
What have you done, Severus Snape?
He stood silently, struck mute by her presence, crushed under the weight of his guilt.
“Sev,” she said in a low voice. “You came.”
I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid.
“Naturally” he replied.
“The footie match isn’t on until tomorrow.” As soon as the words left his lips, his eyes widened in horror. She hadn’t so much as given him the time of day in more than four years. During that time he had joined a genocidal death cult and painted a target on her family that could end in their deaths, and he chose this moment to develop a lousy sense of humour?
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a rush. “It’s dangerous.”
“There are no Death Eaters in Cokeworth” she said with a roll of her eyes. Verdant. Poison. Emeralds in a sky of fire.
“There is at least one,” he replied flatly.
She sat down there on the bare earth beneath their tree, the child in her lap. Severus knew the boy had just had his first birthday. He had a newspaper clipping announcing the child’s birth in a cluttered drawer at home, the date seared into his memory.
Born as the seventh month dies.
Lily, too, was dressed in Muggle clothes. Hers, of course, were not faded or full of holes. She wore fashionable Muggle trousers and a pale blue blouse. Shoulder bag on one side and the infant on the other, wearing some sort of outfit that was probably appropriate for a child in the summer heat.
“Sit down, Sev. I’m not going to crane my neck looking up at you. And I know what you’ve done and I know what you are. I have always known you. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
She had learned to mask her northern accent but didn’t bother to now. At Hogwarts, she had washed the stench of their Muggle mill town from her hair and had made her Muggle clothes a fashion statement to be envied and emulated. Lily had always been a chameleon and her true colors showed only for Severus. The girls in her dorm had never seen her smoke cigarettes and curse at the telly in her coarse accent. Potter and that psychotic fuckwit Black had never seen her with the hem of her skirt tucked into its waistband, bare feet in the river mud as they mucked for ancient treasures that would never be found.
He sat down in front of Lily, in the dirt, wearing his second-hand Muggle clothes. Had he not always been a sniveling child in the dirt at her feet? Severus too had eventually rid himself of the accent and worn the proper robes, moved with the right graces, and spoke with the correct elocution. But no one ever forgot that he grew-up dirt-poor in a Muggle mill town. And no one ever let him forget either.
The actual child was grabbing handfuls of the useless dust and seemed quite pleased to be doing so. Streaks of it were rubbed onto his plump cheeks and caked into his black hair.
“I heard about your mum,” She winced. “And your pa. I'm sorry.”
She didn't look at him with suspicion, which he thought was big of her. But then, she knew the kind of violence Tobias was capable of. She, after all, had been the one to dab Savlon cream on the welts left by Tobias’ leather belt. Severus’ pa had hated Lily. He called her a jumped-up little bitch. That Lily was Serverus’ best (only) friend was all the proof he needed that Severus was unnatural in more mundane ways than his abhorrent status as a wizard.
He pulled a cigarette from its paper box with unsteady fingers. Lily raised a pale red eyebrow and looked pointedly at the baby. He shoved the cigarette back in the box.
He doesn't want to talk about his parents but he doesn't want her to leave either.
“It wasn’t a big loss,” he said dismissively. “Mrs Smithers at the corner shop said Petunia married a whale and moved to the suburbs,” he offered as an alternative topic of conversation.
Lily snorted and leaned back on her elbows. “It’s everything she ever dreamed of. She has a boy Harry’s age. I’ve never seen him.” She tilts her head back to look up into the branches, her hair trailing in the dirt.
Severus caught her up on the town gossip- the river they used to play in was now classified as an environmental hazard, the mill workers were striking again, there was an embezzlement scandal at the local church-run clinic. Severus still passed the same neighbors on the way to the grocer, still shopped at the off-licence that had sold his father cheap, dark bottles of whisky, still frequented the same corner shop where he and Lily bought their first cigarettes with her pocket money. People still stopped him in the streets to ask about the red-headed Evans girl. This grim, soot-stained town would never forget the brilliant light that was Lily Evans, or the dark shadow that followed behind her.
The moving sun peered through the leaves and cast specks of dappled light on the ground between them.
“Dumbledore told us about the prophecy,” she said eventually without prompting. “We are going under the Fidelius charm tonight. He said he has a spy among you-know-who’s Death Eaters who reported that Harry is a target. He wouldn’t tell James who the spy is. I didn’t need him to tell me.”
“And did he tell you who brought the prophecy to the Dark Lord? Did he tell you who set a psychotic megalomaniac on your child?” Severus hissed. He was tearing uselessly at the dying weeds that poked through the dirt.
“I know that part too,” she replied with gentle grace.
“I’m sorry Lily. I am so sorry. I would do anything to go back and change it all,” he whispered brokenly. It was a useless sentiment. There wasn’t a powerful enough Time-Turner in existence that would let him go back and erase his many mistakes.
“I forgive you.”
His tattered soul broke free of his desiccated body. The words were spoken but they should not have been. He didn’t deserve her forgiveness or her mercy. His eyes and ears and throat burned.
Did not our heart burn within us?
“I know it can never be enough, but I’ll do anything I can to keep you safe.”
"I don't need you to save me," she replied. And she never had. Lily was the one who saved him, from the bullies, from the burrowing hunger of poverty, from his father's belt, from his lonely misery. From himself. Until he had made himself irredeemable in her eyes. In his memory it often boiled down to a single moment. That terrible afternoon by the lake where he had said that awful word. But that moment had been coming for months. For years, even. Endless rows about his roommates and his interest in the Dark Arts. Squabbles about her elitist friends and the increasing amount of time she spent with Potter and his gang of strutting little toerags.
“Anything,” was what he said in response.
“I need you to promise to protect Harry. No, don’t interrupt,” she commanded. “Listen. I need you to be the one to protect Harry at all costs. I don’t care about Dumbledore or Voldemort,” Lily stated, leaning forward with intensity.
Severus’ left arm spasmed involuntarily. They both looked at his forearm where his sleeve concealed a multitude of sins.
“I don’t care about good or evil, right or wrong, light or dark. I just want my child to live. I am asking you to promise to do everything in your power to save Harry.” Severus had grown over the years in knowledge and power. It’s what he sacrificed everything for.
“James is good and true and righteous,” she continued. “He wouldn’t betray what he believes in even if it kills us all. I used to believe that I was like that too, until Harry. But I don’t care who has to die, I don’t care who is betrayed, I don’t care who wins this war. Harry must live. I’ll burn the world to ash if that’s what it takes. I need someone on my side, on Harry’s side.” Lily’s eyes flashed green. Avada Kedava. He’d learned that one too.
Hadn’t Severus longed to hear that? Potter, the golden and triumphant lion, could not be what Lily needed. She had come back to the garden of weeds to search for a snake.
Truly, you can't go home again.
Thirteen and one fourth inches, ebony and dragon heartstring. Deceptively pliant. Severus always had a certain… moral flexibility.
“Do you want me to swear an unbreakable vow?” His voice was steel. How easily he has turned from his masters at her call. He doesn’t look back.
“I don’t need a magical vow from you. Your promise is enough. It always has been.”
“Then I promise.”
The child, a stunning replica of James Potter in miniature, was no longer satisfied being ignored. How like his father. He babbled loudly and crawled across the ground to offer Severus a handful of fine, brown dust. Lily picked him up and deposited him into Severus' lap.
Severus had no experience with children beyond his limited interactions with Draco Malfoy. Even then, Narcissa had never insisted that he hold the infant, merely displayed the child in her arms to Severus and received his awkward compliments as her due. He had brewed diaper rash cream and teething relief serum, bespoke for the child of Wizarding royalty, but he hadn’t had to make contact with the fragile, squirming thing.
He sat rigid with terror. He recalled the first time he saw the green-eyed girl who would show him a glimpse of heavenly light, the first time he met the red-eyed creature who would condemn him to eternal darkness, the first time he knelt before the blue-eyed general who would demand his life to save his soul.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” Harry chirped cheerfully at him. The boy stared up at him with Lily eyes in his Potter face.
“‘Hi’ is Harry’s favorite word, isn’t it sweetheart?” Lily cooed at him while rifling through a diaper bag that seemingly had no bottom. She eventually summoned the object with a stern flick of her wand.
“Here!” she declared triumphantly while holding a leather-bound book aloft. She set it on the ground before Severus.
“Dumbledore himself is going to set the Fidelius, I can hardly imagine a stronger one will ever have been performed. But I won’t sit helplessly within a spell of his making. I’ve done some spell casting of my own.” She smiled in that sly way that preceded nearly every instance of mischief Severus had ever been blamed for. They had run wild in the back streets of Spinner’s End but it had always been Lily leading and Severus following. Lily had thrown the rock through the window at the paper mill. Lily had pushed Mark Baker down the stairs at the foot of the primary school after he called Severus a poncy tramp. Lily stole the cigarettes from the market on the high street. Lily had drunk the communion wine behind the church altar. But it was always Severus who burned for her.
The book was bound in human skin. He wondered distantly if the removal and processing of human hide was a specialized skill or if any tanner could manage it. A beautiful and morbid pattern inlaid the leather like lace on a gown. It was a lovely and chilling sight. He opened the cover and turned to the title page. He already knew what it would say.
The Rites of Blood and Bone
Blood magic is, by its nature, one of the Dark Arts. Blood carries life, and life stands always at the edge of the River. Spill it, and the River draws near. Through blood, the practitioner may draw upon the thanergy that flows between its banks. That is the foundation of the Dark Arts. Your intent doesn't matter. Your beliefs and ethics don't matter. The River doesn't care why; it only cares that the price was paid.
Severus has changed in their years apart. So too, it seems, has Lily.
Harry has a lock of Severus’ oily black hair clenched in his chubby fist. He’s been alternating between shoving the fistful of hair in his mouth and babbling his displeasure at finding it still attached to Severus’ head. It’s probably not hygienic for anyone.
Severus twirls his wand in his fingers, an old, anxious habit that Lily smirks at. He lifts the book up with the hand that is not currently preventing Harry from falling face-first in the dirt. There was a time when he might have killed to get his hands on a copy of The Rites of Blood and Bone. Literally. It was so monstrously expensive and rare that not even the Malfoy library could boast of owning one. He had spoken often of this book during their school years, of the rites and rituals found only in these pages. This is not the kind of text that Lily should have access to. Black, Severus thought bitterly. He imagined the look on Sirius Black’s face if he knew Lily was sitting here with Snivellus perusing the infamous blood magic book. That cheered him up some. It fell open to a page that had been marked with a thin black ribbon.
Ritus Ancorae Alterae is written at the top of the page. Under it there is a helpful runic chart to guide the placement of the symbols, a tidy list of needed supplies, and an ominous warning that everything returns to the River.
He looks back at her with a raised eyebrow. For all of her scolding about his involvement in the Dark Arts, she too peered into dark places and thrilled at what she found there. She has always been less honest than him.
Ten and one fourth inches, willow and phoenix feather. Unyielding.
“You've been doing some reading,” he says glibly.
“Oh, you know how much free time housewives have on their hands,” she responds in a similar tone. She would have considerably more than time on her hands if she had been attempting any of those rituals. Blood magic was a messy business and the River had never washed anything clean.
Lily watches him turn the pages of The Rites of Blood and Bone.
“You always did like the most horrid books.”
Severus snorts.
“And you always liked pretending to disapprove while reading over my shoulder.”
She smiles despite herself.
“I disapproved of your judgment, not your curiosity.”
“Convenient distinction.”
The smile fades.
“No, Severus. An important one.”
The wind stirs dust around their feet. Harry bangs two rocks together with great conviction.
“You always wanted to know the ugliest things about magic,” Lily says quietly. “And you were never content to just know. You always had to put it into practice.”
He laughs once- humourless.
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.
“I already knew the ugliest things about people. I didn’t have the luxury of impractical pursuit," His dark eyes flick briefly toward Spinner’s End. “If one’s going to be burned by fire, at least magic is honest.”
“And what has all that honesty bought you? A madman’s Mark burned into your skin?”
“And what has righteousness bought you?” he snarls back. “You spent years telling me there were things decent people simply did not do. Now you're frightened enough, and suddenly the rules are negotiable.”
Lily's jaw tightens.
“I'm not asking you to pretend this is good.”
“No. You're only asking me to do it.”
“Because you're the only person I know who can.”
“Do you remember when we were twelve,” she asks, “and you made Petunia break out in boils?” Severus smirks.
“She called you a freak.”
“You waded into the River and blood-magicked my annoying sister because she was mean to me.”
Harry throws dirt into the air.
“I was furious with you.”
“I remember.”
“Not because it was Dark.”
His smile disappears.
“Because you carved into your own flesh to do it.”
Lily looks at him.
“You always were quick to draw blood for love,” Lily says softly, “your own faster than anyone else’s.”
“You used to believe intent mattered.”
“I believed a lot of foolish things when I was a child. I’ve had to put away childish things.”
She pulls a closed fist from the pocket of her Muggle trousers and extends her hand towards him.
“Magic always takes,” she says quietly. “You taught me that.”
He holds his palm out, fingers cupped, and they close around a small glass sphere, no bigger than a marble. It is attached to a silver chain. He peers into the orb and sees at its center a single drop of blood.
“Harry’s blood,” she says. “Anchored and bound.”
“Dumbledore has his plots, James has his goodness.”
Her eyes meet his.
“I have you.”
He loops the chain around his neck and lets the charmed glass fall against his chest. Harry promptly grabs the sphere and pops it into his mouth. It belongs to him, so it only seems fair.
“Can you do it?” she demands.
“You know I can.” Severus had been practicing blood magic since before they first set foot in Hogwarts. He'd found a little book hidden away in his mother's things. Greedy fingers searching for evidence of another life, far from Sinner’s End. One full of beautiful magic, of warmth, of light. Instead, he'd found a primer in blood magic. Written at a time when every Prince child would have been expected to stand in the shallows of the River. A candle, a penknife, and a willingness to suffer was all it took for a magical child to have his first taste of power.
“Will you pay the price?” she whispered, at last a hint of guilt. “Will you wade that deep?”
He remembered her, age eight, sneaking down the alley behind his house in the middle of the night. She would climb softly atop the metal dustbin and then pull herself up onto the slanted shingle roof of the bathroom. The bathroom had been added long after the house was built, jutting awkwardly from the back of the terrace like an afterthought. From there, she could fit her tiny fingers and the tips of her shoes into the gaps between the crumbling red bricks of the back wall and climb up to the lead eaves of the rowhouse. She was fearless. He’d always known she was a Gryffindor.
She’d climb to his window and shimmy inside through the narrow space and drop onto his bare little cot.
It was there, beneath his bed where they hid from the monsters haunting his house, that the two of them read the books Severus had stolen from his mother’s old steamer trunk in the attic. He kept them under his floorboards by day and pulled them out at night for Lily. Solid puddles of candlewax still marked the floor of his childhood bedroom. From those stolen books they had learned that magic had a price. It didn’t surprise them. Two children from a dying factory town learned early that everything had a price.
Ritus Ancorae Alterae did not ask:
What are you willing to sacrifice?
Only:
When shall the River stop taking?
A cold yearning tugged at his guts.
“I can,” he replies. And he could. He wanted to. Once one takes up the Dark Arts, they cannot so easily be set aside.
Lily looks down at Harry, now occupied with chewing industriously upon the sleeve of Severus’ henley.
“Only if you must. The Fidelius will hold,” she says. “Dumbledore believes it will. I believe it.” And who is she trying to convince?
“But if it doesn't…Well, some things I won't leave up to fate.”
“You don't know what it will demand.” He wonders how far she'll go. But then he already knows the answer.
Everything returns to the River.
“No,” she answers. “But I know what you’d pay.”
Anything. Everything.
Lily stands and brushes dirt and leaves from the seat of her trousers. When she reaches for Harry, he yelps with indignation.
“Hi!” he yowls and clings to Severus' shirt, a pudgy fist still wrapped around the pendant.
“He doesn't want to let you go,” Lily says dryly. “It must run in the blood.” She pulls Harry free and sets him on her hip. She looks to the sky to judge the position of the sun.
“I need to meet Dumbledore before dark.”
Severus rises to his feet also. Lily touches the blood pendant hanging around his neck and tucks it beneath his shirt. Severus wonders vaguely what Potter would think if he knew what she had done. What she is yet to do.
The Dark Arts had taken Lily from him. Slowly at first, then all at once. Yet somehow it was the dark that had brought her back to him, to this place, beneath their tree, if only long enough to ask him to burn for her one final time.
“Goodbye, Sev,” Lily said firmly.
“Bye, Sev!” the little redheaded girl whispered as she shimmied her way out of his dark window.
Harry reaches out to him mournfully and sobs “Bye! Bye!”
Severus feels the pendant burning hot against his chest, book heavy in his hand. He looks towards the sun set low in the sky.
Present your bodies a living sacrifice.
He will be ready. He will not fail her again.