InsaneJournal

Snape's Bday: Lighting Frozen Candles, G

Title: Lighting Frozen Candles
Author: lore
Rating: G
Challenge: Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many. & Youth is a disease from which we all recover.
Summary: On his first birthday after the war, Severus makes a discovery that changes everything.
Disclaimer: Don't worry, JKR, I'm just taking them out for air. They'll be back soon.
Notes: 1000+ words. Many thanks to my betas scribbulus_ink, innerslytherin, kellanine, and karasu_hime. Yes, it takes a village, but if there's still mistakes, they're all mine, baybee! Comments or feedback of any kind welcome, including concrit.


Severus couldn't help it, brooding over a glass of firewhisky on this day, his first birthday since Voldemort fell. Most wizards looked at 40 as a time of passing from their youth into middle years. Severus was only 39, and yet it was an age he'd never expected to obtain.

He'd seen the signs, read the patterns; he'd known when death would strike and had written off his 40s. Never would he have the opportunity to recover from the disease of his youth.

Except here he was, 39-years-old, quietly ensconced in an unplottable dream home, the long years of his life unspooling in his mind's eye. Only the film was disturbingly blank, a rare mistake, an over-exposure that Severus felt keenly. This current life had been a gift, one he was still struggling to accept seven months later.

"I should have died," he told his tumbler, a solid weight in a sea of uncertainty.

"But you didn't."

Severus twitched, startled, but managed to hold onto his drink. The glare he gave Albus' portrait would have burned the canvas of lesser wizards.

"Because you told Re--Lupin where to find me. You saved his life and mine, again, but for what? This?" Severus used his drink to gesture at the airy room, filled with ancient tomes that would never get dusty, a fireplace big enough to Floo two people at once, and a lavish herb garden just beyond the ornate double doors leading onto a large patio and all the grounds beyond them. A cry echoed from deep in the house, and in the perfect silence, Severus could hear footsteps rushing toward the sound. "I don't know how to be what they need."

"It doesn't matter if you know how, my dear boy. You are what they need." Albus' fingers came up into the frame, steepled before him. "And who Remus chose, I'll have you know."

Severus' eyes grew wide and his heart began to beat faster. Nymphadora Tonks was a forbidden subject between them, and in all these months of living together in one of Albus' many homes, Severus had never reached a place where he felt he could rage his way through the subject; she had been Remus' beloved wife, or so Severus had thought. "He could have saved her?"

"Yes," Albus said evenly, which told Severus his old friend was covering up yet another regret. "It would have been more difficult, and there were less guarantees of her survival, but Remus didn't wait for me to explain any of that. I said you could live, or Miss Tonks could be brought back, and Remus immediately asked where you were."

The portrait chuckled then, and Severus thought he saw the first flash of a twinkle that most had assumed couldn't be captured by mere painting magic. "If he had paused to listen to the rest of what I'd had to say, he would have known where you had hidden the blood replenishing potions and your recovery would not have taken quite as long."

Severus was standing, although he couldn't consciously remember rising. Remus called to him from Teddy's room, another of his futile attempts to get Severus to join them, see them as his family. Severus hadn't touched the baby more than ten times since this house had revealed itself to them; Remus had tried to make him feel welcome to help with parenting Teddy, but the memory of Tonks rose between them like an unscalable cliff face. Sex had started tentatively and remained so until it had been dropped altogether, quite unlike their year together before Snape had been forced to kill Albus. That year had been full of wild passion and desperate tenderness as Severus had counted down the days left between them like precious drops of dragon blood, his secret despair.

In this new life Remus had dragged him into, they had been little more than roommates for the past four months, Severus passing through the house like a ghost, leaving the barest signs of life in his wake and interacting only when forced. He couldn't listen to Lupin's entreaties of love and friendship when Severus had thought the man was in mourning.

"He chose me."

Suddenly, Remus' shifting moods made sense, the crying that had come with intense release, the bath times he never invited Severus to take part in, the complete and utter silence on one Nymphadora Tonks. Remus had had a choice, and in going to Severus, he'd doomed the mother of his child. Albus was droning on about the difficulties of bringing back someone from the dead, even the freshly dead, over saving a still-living body, but Severus already knew all of it; he had been a Death Eater, after all. It was the fact that Remus didn't know, had rushed to save his former lover's life, that caused Severus' world to tilt crazily and right itself, suddenly as bright as if he had spent all day brewing and stepped outside the dungeon door for fresh air.

Severus picked up the remains of his drink and downed it in one go.

"Don't regret growing older, Severus," he heard Albus say. "It is a privilege denied to many."

"I-"

"Severus?" Remus' call sounded desperate, Teddy's wailing reaching an alarming decibel from five rooms away.

Opening a drawer and removing a pristine dust cloth that was never needed in a house charmed to perfection by Albus Dumbledore, Severus ran it over the former headmaster's frame anyway, the only sign of affection he could think to show the portrait. "I don't, Albus."

He left the cloth on the mantle, and when he turned, Remus was standing in the doorway, a squirming Teddy barely contained in his arms. "Remus," Severus said firmly, the name fervent and rolling off his tongue, the way he'd always wanted to speak it.

Remus flinched in surprise, his reply infused with the same soft hesitance he'd embodied for months, an inflection Severus now recognized as fear. He frowned and decided his gift to himself would be to finally act and react, so that he would never hear such a tone from Remus again. "I- I thought you were ignoring us."

Standing where he was, Severus was able to address both portrait and Remus when he said with all the warmth his thawing heart could muster, "No. Not anymore."

fin.


love, lore