FIC for all LE/SS shippers! "Five Times Lily and Severus Almost Made It" Title: Five Times Lily and Severus Almost Made It Author:butterfly_kate Recipient: for all LE/SS shippers! Rating: PG Words: ~2,000 Warnings: none Summary:It should have been easy. Sometimes it seemed like it could be. Author's Notes: With thanks to S for the beta.
Five Times Lily and Severus Almost Made It
Once, they had quietly walked out in the snow together. Everyone else had been at Hogsmeade, but for some reason that neither of them remembered later, they had stayed behind.
The most vivid memory Lily had of that day was the feel of the snow crunching underneath her shoes. It was more vivid than the long and intense conversations they had, or the way that he had looked at her (he always did look at her that way, after all). The rest was all flashes. Pieces of memory that played in her head like a picture book. It was beautiful.
Most of the time, they didn’t get to do this, to just be friends. Not at school anyway. In the summer it was easier, when they were back at home with only their families and one another for company. But neither Lily nor Severus felt completely themselves there; they were children of winter and nothing looked more right in the world to Lily than Severus’s pale pallor against the backdrop of the snow. She thought he looked like a painting and told him so. He looked uncomfortable and disagreed.
‘After Hogwarts, let’s run away,’ she had said, on the spur of the moment. ‘Just for a year.’ He looked at her like she was mad, and inquired as to where precisely they would go. ‘Paris,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to Paris and live in an apartment near the Eiffel Tower. We’ll work in an Apothecary and we’ll be friends with all of the most revolutionary witches and wizards in France.’ He arched an eyebrow, sceptically. ‘And I’ll wear a beret.’
‘Now you have me convinced,’ he had said, dryly, causing her to laugh.
It wasn’t a pipedream to her, not back then. She wished she could have told him that her desire wasn’t just to run away for ‘a year’, but forever. To make potions, go on long walks and not have to worry. She did worry. She worried very specifically about Severus. The world was changing. He might just change along with it.
-
Her fascination with Dementors had ended abruptly when she and Severus had encountered one in Hogsmeade. He laughed afterwards, mostly at her, but whilst they were near it was he who suffered the most. He said things – apparently without knowing – that made Lily’s heart melt and break all at once. He made her want to take care of him. He was fragile.
His body close to hers on the ground, his arm flung around her in protection and then her hand cupping his face in an attempt to bring him back to reality. It all made her heart race in a way that she wasn’t used to with him.
But the moment passed, of course, followed by laughter and Severus stalwartly giving her Honeydukes chocolate and refusing it himself. She smiled at him gratefully and decided to pretend that she hadn’t heard the things he’d said when the Dementors came near. Nothing good would come of trying to reach out to him over it anyway. It was best to simply smile and take the knowledge for safekeeping.
He asked her what she thought of the Dementors, having encountered one for real. She managed a witty remark that she would repeat when she retold the story to her friends back in the Gryffindor dormitory.
Afterwards, it felt as though she had missed a chance, that a singular moment had occurred that could have gone one way or another. It was only much later, with the clarity of death, that the pieces began to fit and Lily realised that if she had been fated to kiss Severus, she should have – would have? – done it in that moment lying on the ground after the Dementor had gone. It was a stepping-stone in time, a fork in the road. She had picked the right path, of course, because without that choice there would be no Harry, be no saviour for her people. It was hard not to feel regret, or something like it.
-
‘Can you pass me the pestle and mortar?’
It was like a riot in Potions. Slughorn did little to discourage his students from inquiring about his friends, or to encourage them to continue with the practical work. Lily and Severus were too intrigued by the limits of their own abilities to let the opportunity pass them by. But that didn’t mean Lily couldn’t shoot the odd comment across the room at the others from time to time. She was good at multi-tasking.
Severus dutifully passed the pestle and mortar, their fingers catching slightly as he did so. He didn’t look at her. She could practically see him attempting to tone down the impact of the electricity of contact.
‘Severus …’ Her words caught in her throat as he turned to look at her, thick black hair hanging forward. She didn’t quite know what to say so instead gave him a warm smile. He didn’t return it.
-
Lying in bed with the curtains of her four-poster drawn closed around her, Lily was all too aware of her own thoughts and predicaments. She was trapped, caught between two worlds, not entirely accepted in either of them. Branded a freak by her sister and called a ‘Mudblood’ by so many of her peers, she often felt lost. Severus accepted her for who she was and had always done so, but there was no disguising the fact that he was also a part of the problem.
If it had been difficult when she had arrived at Hogwarts, bright-eyed and without an inkling of unrest only to find that she was different, even here, then living in a place where the words ‘Death Eaters’ were muttered perpetually was almost too much to take. It was a constant fear, for herself and the unknown and a fear that those she loved would be taken from her. It was a rational fear. That didn’t make it any easier.
Something told her that staying up in Gryffindor Tower wouldn’t be enough for her. She wasn’t safe. These days, danger was beginning to lurk on every corner. Defence Against the Dark Arts was becoming more necessary than ever. But that’s not how everyone saw it. That’s not how he saw it. It was dangerous, being friends with someone who seemed to oppose everything she stood for, or spent time with people who did anyway. For all of their talking, Severus didn’t often say very much anymore; it was all empty phrases and hopeful glances. It wasn’t enough for her.
Yet Lily still found herself tied to him, almost inexplicably drawn to this boy who by all rights she should hate. She’d heard him calling others like her ‘Mudblood’, seen him poring over books from the Restricted Section and felt his rage and hatred towards those she called friends. How could they co-exist together? How had they made it this far?
Just as there was no disguising that Severus was part of the problem, there was also no disguising that he was part of her solution. He had always been there, unfalteringly loyal and by her side for almost her entire life. He was constant; the only constant thing that she had outside of herself. Sometimes she felt like he was part of her, or perhaps a mirror image of everything she was. She could not imagine her world without him in it.
That settled it then. She would talk to him. She would find him when the Defence Against the Dark Arts OWL exam was over the following day. She would find him and convince him to help her, to be more than what they were. Maybe Paris wasn’t a pipedream after all. Maybe they could do it. They could make it.
-
After the Sorting, she hadn’t seen him for three whole days. Well, she had, but not really. She had seen him across the Great Hall, sullenly listening to the chatter of his companions. She had seen him refusing to meet her eyes in the corridors and turning his back to her in Potions. On the fourth day she found him lost on the sixth floor and offered to help him. It seemed a good idea to pretend that she wasn’t lost herself at this point.
He walked with her without looking at her for a while, then asked if she was lost, too. She said she wasn’t.
‘Why do you think the Hat sorted us differently, Sev?’ she asked, looking at him for some shred of hope that their friendship could be saved.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe we’re different.’
This wasn’t the whole story and they both knew it.
‘But … we’re friends. We should be in the same house.’
‘We can still be friends,’ he said quietly. ‘Can’t we?’
A weight seemed to be lifted off Lily’s shoulders and all of a sudden she felt like she could fly.
‘Of course!’ She grinned at him. He smiled back, a little coy.
‘You’re lost, aren’t you, Lily?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘No. I’m not lost. We’re just taking the scenic route – we’ll get to where we’re supposed to be.’
Looking back on it, she didn’t know if they ever did.