lilyest (lilyest) wrote in reoccurrence, @ 2020-07-09 20:01:00 |
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The last Lily had heard of her former childhood friend, he had been an initiated, marked Death Eater - a member of the group who were hell bent on finding her family and killing her son. So receiving a message from him was… disconcerting, to say the least. She’d spent a week and a half trying to get up the nerve to track him down, and now he was due to leave in a day or so and the promised conversation still hadn’t happened. Still, he seemed sincere in his desire to speak to her. And she had to assume that if he was a danger to her or anyone, he wouldn’t be allowed to walk around loose in the building. Certainly they would not have put him in a room with Sirius; that was asking for a murder to happen. Making sure she had her newly issued wand within easy reach, she waited until James was otherwise occupied before slipping away. As much as she loved him, she had a feeling that if he knew where she was going he’d either try to stop her or insist on coming along. She could look after herself, she thought, before reminding herself that she had already died once. Somehow that was both hard to remember and impossible to forget. The book room was quiet, which would have been nice any other time, after two weeks of near-nonstop tears and drama and noise, but at the moment it felt a little eerie. Lily took careful steps around one of the shelves until she spotted a black-clad figure reclining in one of the chairs. “Sev?” she said, automatically, and only too late remembered they weren’t friends anymore, and maybe she ought to have called him something else. -- The days since his arrival at the facility had mostly blended all together, though a couple did stand out--the day he realized he was sharing a room with Sirius Black of all people, of course, and the day She arrived. It would have been impossible to miss, even if he hadn’t been looking for her, but the coward in him had hoped that he would be released before she came back. It would have been easier that way, probably for both of them, but definitely for him. Severus didn’t like to think about what she probably thought of him during that time, even though it was only his own insistence that no one--including her--know that he was the reason they knew to be hidden behind the strongest charms possible. Surely her opinion of him would have changed if she knew. But he wasn’t sure it mattered, at least not back then. It mattered to him, now, that she know the truth, and that was the only reason he wrote to her. Otherwise, he would have simply attempted to avoid her as he tried to avoid everyone else. With no war, no role to play or mask to put on, and apparently no death either, all he really wanted was to be left alone. And he would leave her alone if that was what she wanted. He let her know he wanted to talk, but Severus wasn’t going to push or insist, he knew he didn’t have the right to. And yet, knowing that she might find him, or reach out, did not exactly prepare him to see her standing in front of him. For some reason, she looked different from how he thought she’d look. Not the clothes, necessarily, but her face, her hair--the way she carried herself. Like he expected her to look fifteen, the way he remembered her best. But of course she was a different person now than she’d been then. They both were, even if only one of them knew that. And he’d wanted to tell her that, in the hopes that he had eventually earned her forgiveness, but suddenly he couldn’t remember that. He couldn’t remember anything at all. “You’re really here,” he said, more to himself than to her, like he expected his eyes to lie to him. If he hadn’t seen and experienced both Sirius Black and James Potter in the flesh in the days since his arrival in the facility, he wouldn’t have believed his eyes at all. Even now, he still almost didn’t. -- Lily’s breath caught a little when he looked up and met her eyes. She’d seen Sirius, and that had been pretty shocking, but she hadn’t seen Severus since Hogwarts. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to the sensation of seeing someone who was meant to be the same age she was, looking like they’d swallowed a permanent aging potion. Like he was the victim of yet another one of the boys’ pranks, again. She wasn’t afraid. Perhaps she ought to have been, but she just felt… stunned. It didn’t help that he was staring at her as though she was totally different too, when of course she wasn’t. “You… look like your dad,” she said, wide-eyed, and then her brain caught up to her mouth, too late. “Sorry,” she added. -- Ah. Yes. Severus probably deserved that, even though she apologized. Lily was probably the only person around who would understand the significance of such a comparison, but he let it slide nonetheless. He didn’t like to think he had anything in common with the man who made his childhood fearful and miserable, but in hindsight, there probably weren’t too many differences between them anymore. “It’s fine,” he assured her, and left it at that. Now that she was standing in front of him, expecting him to talk, he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to start. He knew what he wanted to tell her, what he wanted her to know--everything, basically, but mostly he needed her to know that he wasn’t what she thought he was. The Dark Mark was still on his arm, but that didn’t make him a Death Eater. That knowledge gave him a starting point, however. “I don’t--What did they tell you? About about happened...after?” She’d been dead for nearly 17 years for him, but time had not made it any easier to talk about what had happened to her. -- |