literature

Lily and the Unicorn, Part One

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Idris Mulligan brought out a shallow stone basin – it looked like a Pensieve, but its contents were not bright and silvery, like a liquefied mirror, as Severus had come to expect. At first, he thought the bowl was empty, but then the old woman dipped her wand into it, and, when she brought it out, there was a thin, slippery rope of what looked like tar or treacle hanging from the tip. It broke with the motion of her trembling fingers and slithered back into the bowl, with a horrible wet, sucking sound.

“This,” she said, “is Dementor memory.”

“I’m not going in there,” said Snape emphatically. “It’s disgusting.”

“Precisely,” murmured Idris Mulligan, “it is a distillation of all the worst things that happen to people over their filthy lives. The Dementors simply make you aware of it – because people have a tendency to forget, when everything is going right, the torments and indignities that this world can put you through, all in the name of happiness. The Dementors remind us that it is not worth it. They show us the truth, but nobody wants to hear it. They run off with their fingers in their ears, or a filthy Patronus guarding their precious delusions, and banish the Dementors to Azkaban, to work their cleansing powers on those who least deserve it.”

Severus started to look around for an escape route, but Azkaban cells had clearly been designed to squash every thought of this kind. The door and windows were barred, and he knew from the muted moans and screams coming from the neighbouring cells that there were Dementors guarding the corridors. Without his wand – the crazy old bat must have it somewhere, maybe in the pockets of her robes – he couldn’t hope to get past them.

And, anyway, what would be the point? Where would he run to? Everyone wanted to kill him. Dumbledore was his best hope, and he would simply see to it that Severus was thrown back into one of these cells. He might as well get comfortable.  

“These memories were taken from the Dementor that captured you in the Gatehouse,” Idris Mulligan said pleasantly. “I rather think your companions got away because the Dementor had his hands full with all of your bitter recollections.”

Severus frowned. He couldn’t remember a Dementor attacking him. He remembered self-hatred kicking in like a shot of adrenaline, almost making him throw up, but that had been troubling him off and on ever since Lily had been put under the Cruciatus Curse in the Hanged Man. There was nothing special about it.

And Dementors couldn’t see the future, he was adamant of that. All in all, it looked as though Idris Mulligan was trying to trick him. What the black potion in the Pensieve was, he had no idea, but it could be some kind of hallucinogen, designed to make him lose hope. He just had to remember, whatever the potion did to him, that he mustn’t give up Lily.   

Idis Mulligan waved her wand, and the chains that had been binding his arms to the wall loosened, and then retracted into the stone sheepishly, like scolded children. Severus let his arms drop. He still couldn’t move his hands, but he felt a surge of tingling warmth, as though the blood was flowing back into his arms, and trying to reclaim his extremities.

He looked at the compass strapped to his wrist. Handwriting was threading its way across the glass face – it was looped and untidy, almost illegible with eagerness – but he recognized it as Lily’s. It said: ‘Hold On’.

All told, Severus wasn’t sure whether he felt better or worse for this. He would have liked Lily to stay as far as possible from this demented old crone, but it was a comfort to know that she hadn’t forgotten him.    

Idris Mulligan, with a strength that he wouldn’t have expected from a trembling, mad old woman, grabbed a fist-full of his hair, and plunged his head into the bowl like a bully shoving his head down a toilet. Snape spluttered, and felt his nostrils fill with the black potion – it smelled like car exhaust fumes and whisky – it smelled like Spinner’s End – it was like a reverse Amortentia, filling his senses with all the things that were calculated to revolt them.      

And then, as he closed his eyes against the throat-burning blackness, scraps of colour and movement began to appear. He saw people clustered around a war memorial in a village square. Flashing lights were making the white faces whiter. The sound of flames crackling – like popping bubble-wrap – and a child crying, suddenly filled his head.  

And then he saw himself: not much of him, admittedly, because he was a blur too, hurrying through the patches of light and shadow, shoving people out of the way, but Severus recognized the lank black hair, and the billowing cloak, and he followed them through the crowd. The adult Snape – for he was clearly older, but not by more than a few years – was scattering people in his haste; there were yelps and mutterings of pain, but they were all strangely muted. It was as though the crowd had been struck with a Silencing Charm. They were only speaking in hushed voices, and they seemed sheepish, abashed, the way you’d feel if you were watching history unfold before your eyes, and you didn’t feel worthy of it; you didn’t know why it had chosen your life-time, and your location, in which to appear. You suddenly felt as though you should be saying meaningful things; you suddenly felt as though you shouldn’t have kicked that cat on your way to work this morning – because now you were in the middle of an epic drama, and karma counted in places like that.        

There was an ivy-covered cottage, broken open. It looked wrong to Severus, like seeing a head broken open. There was no wall to the upper floor anymore, and flames were licking the shattered brick-work with misplaced tenderness.

Severus saw his adult self stop: he reached out a hand to steady himself on the gate, and then half-sank, half-fell, onto the little stone wall beside it.

Severus couldn’t see what had stopped him, what had made him fall, what was making him sink his face into his hands. No-one was paying any attention to the black-caped figure on the lawn. All eyes were drawn to the giant – it was Hagrid – standing in the fiery doorway, reeking of smoke, with minor flames fizzling in his beard. He was holding a baby, clumsily wrapped in blankets. Its chubby little arm was stirring. The crowd were gasping and pointing at this unexpected sign of life. The Silencing Charm that had made them so sheepish was breaking up in places, like radio static, and scattered shouts, cheers, screams and whispers were breaking out like fires all over the village square.

“What’s happening?” he asked the shadowy figure of Idris Mulligan, who had followed him through the crowd, her lip curling with disgust at all the hopeful faces. She was pulling the hem of her cloak away from the villagers nearest her, as though she was afraid of being contaminated by their touch.    

“Why don’t you see for yourself?” she replied absent-mindedly.

Severus just shook his head.

“Sure?” Idris Mulligan asked, in that tone of sneering amusement. “She looks ever so pretty. And it’s the last time you’ll see her, after a - ,”

“It’s not real,” he said, not even giving her a chance to finish.  

Hagrid was holding the baby over his head now, and the crowd was cheering, but the adult Snape was not even looking at them. His head was bowed, his arms curled inwards, as though he was screwing himself up against the pain.  

“It’s not real,” Severus repeated, in a smaller voice.

“No harm in looking, then, is there?” Mrs Mulligan replied.

Severus hesitated. He had seen her dead, covered in bruises and blood, hair spread out on the ground around her like a ragged red halo – he had seen that before in his nightmares. It was the sort of thing you were bound to see if you spent all your time reading about poisons and dark curses, and listening to pure-blood Slytherins droning on about what they’d like to do to the muggle-born interlopers who were corrupting the magical world. He’d had to listen to a Bellatrix-monologue where she acted out the tortures she wanted to perform on them – with sound-effects and everything. Snape’s imagination was gloomy, but not without reason. He understood, better than anyone, how cruel people were prepared to be, to make themselves feel better.

He had always comforted himself by thinking: “But I’m smarter than these idiots. Whatever they want to do to her, I’ll be there first. And I’ll make them wish they’d never been born. I’ll make them wish they’d never been thought of. I’ll make them wish their parents hadn’t been born, to even contemplate giving birth to them.”

But, after tonight, he knew that there was one person, at least, he couldn’t protect her from. Bella and Malfoy and Regulus and Avery – he knew how to get round them. He’d had practice. Appeal to their vanity, or their blatant insanity, and you had them in the palm of your hand.

But Voldemort was single-minded. He could be tricked, but only once: and Severus had used up his life-time’s quota already. He couldn’t protect her from Voldemort anymore.

Still, whatever morbid conclusions his imagination had reached by now, the reality was much worse. He wasn’t prepared – could never have been prepared – for how horrible it was.  

Her eyes were open. Those beloved green eyes – the ones that had given him goose-bumps from the first moment he’d seen them – were staring up at him so accusingly, that he had to put up an arm to shield himself from the sight.

There were no bruises; there was no blood. She looked exactly as she had done in life – except that motion was intrinsic to Lily’s life. Severus couldn’t imagine her without motion. Even when he’d watched her sleep, her chest had risen and fallen; she had stirred with the motion of her dreams, sometimes smiling or biting her lip, and Severus, watching with a kind of hungry contentment, would have given his whole life to share in what she was seeing behind those eyelids.

But now there was no eager blush on her cheeks, no mischievous smile. Everything that made her Lily had departed, leaving a pretty little shell on the lawn, staring up at him.

But this wasn’t real. This was just Mulligan messing with his head. This was what he was afraid of, and so this was what he was seeing. Lily was supposed to die tonight, not some years in the future, with a baby and a cottage and – oh, yes, a husband. Severus hadn’t seen him at first. James Potter was lying on the ground beside her, eyes closed, glasses askew. His dead white hand seemed to be reaching out for her. The adult Snape, with a grimace of anger, shoved it away.

Severus was in complete agreement. So Potter had her even in death. He didn’t have to rub everyone’s nose in it by draping his filthy corpse all over her.

And he was imagining the reproach in her eyes. Dead eyes couldn’t reproach people.

The wind blew a yellow sycamore leaf onto her neck and the adult Snape removed it tenderly. Then he folded his arms over his chest with a convulsive movement, and hunched his shoulders against the crowd at his back, as though he was trying to fold in on himself, disappear, sink into the stone wall and the fretful night and just cease.   

He needn’t have bothered, Severus thought, glancing around at the crowd: they were all looking at the baby. Lily was already forgotten. But he must have been hiding his feelings out of habit, because he was hardly aware of the crowd. Or perhaps he didn’t want to cry or shout in front of Lily, because those eyes were still serenely open, reflecting the fire-light from the cottage, still mocking death with their vivid colour, which was bright as life itself. Brighter, really. She had epitomized life for Severus. She had kindled life in Severus.  

“Seen enough?” said Idris Mulligan.

“It isn’t real,” he said abruptly, still unable to draw his eyes away from Lily’s discarded but beautiful shell.  

“Yes, you said. Well, come along, Severus. We’ve got a lot to get through. You’re a Dementor’s dream, you know. Not much to eat, but an awful lot to play with.”   
   
The scene faded around him. Severus kept his eyes on Lily’s for a long time: they were the last things to fade, and even when they twinkled out, he knew they’d be scarred onto the insides of his eye-lids forever. He couldn’t un-see what he’d seen. It would replace the circle of Death Eaters in his nightmares. It would always be there to torment or reproach him, when he was feeling sad, or angry. The next time he had a fight with Lily about her moronic Gryffindor friends – the next time Potter made a fool of him in front of the whole school – there it would be – the thread that could make him unravel – and all he had to do was pull.    

He found himself in Dumbledore’s office, staring out of the long windows at the castle grounds below. The last vision had been of an unfamiliar place, had been fragmented with flashing lights and panicky whispers, but this one was spectacularly detailed. Severus recognized everything.

There were the whirring silver instruments that he’d been forced to stare at so many times when he’d been given detention up here, for transfiguring members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team into toads, or some other minor misdemeanor; they were chugging quietly away, some of them emitting puffs of steam which twisted themselves into the shape of arcane symbols, before breaking apart on the high ceiling rafters, or the frames of old Headmasters and Mistresses.

Dumbledore was sitting behind his desk, but there were no noticeable differences in him: perhaps he looked graver than usual: there was less of the impudent, bouncing curiosity that he usually radiated, but then, perhaps he was waiting to tell off a student, or give a speech to the Board of Governors, or advise the Minister for Magic on how to tie his shoe-laces.   

Severus turned away from the Headmaster to stare out of the window, trying to still the pounding of his heart by watching the scenery.

It was a grey, Autumnal day out there. The trees that weren’t skeletal were a muddy gold. The mountains in the distance were half-covered in mist, and there were students on the sloping lawn that led down to the lake, outfitted in cloaks and scarves, throwing leaves in the air or levitating their play-mates, jumping rope or playing tag. They were tripping through the mud and leaves in great excitement. There was something almost hysterical about it. Others – most of them seemed to be Slytherins – were huddled together and muttering darkly. Severus recognized the look of a crowd buzzing with gossip. Something had happened.

He looked – as defiantly as he could, after seeing Lily dead and staring up at him – at Idris Mulligan, who’d materialized beside him, and was standing with her hands clasped behind her back, watching Dumbledore with an air of incredulous disbelief.

There was a curt knock on the Office door, and Dumbledore muttered a distracted invitation to enter. He was staring sadly at the parchment in front of him.

Severus saw his older self come in, and wondered if he’d come straight from hell. His hair was wet from the rain, and there were dark circles under his eyes, but it was the animation, the barely-contained anger, that made him look so hellish. He looked bedraggled, but fierce, like some kind of demonic emissary, crackling with energy – all of it angry, but none of it purposeful. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He looked as though he was waiting for something, but had no idea what. His arms were folded compulsively, as though he was physically holding back his heart, and he put Severus in mind of a coiled spring – as though, the moment he relaxed and uncoiled himself, the sky would fall down on his head.

This angry energy was there to distract him from his pain. He didn’t want to be idle, he didn’t even want to be alone – because, if he was, he would remember – or, worse still, look ahead, to the grey, Lily-less years opening up before him, like some kind of beckoning chasm.

Severus recognized the impulse to keep busy, the urge to be doing something. Passive suffering was not his style. It chilled him to the bone to realize that he could see himself in this man, who was suffering more than he’d ever seen anyone suffer.     

“You’ve cancelled lessons,” the adult Snape said curtly.  

“I did not think anyone would be able to concentrate,” Dumbledore replied. “Lessons will re-commence on Monday, but if you need more time, I can arrange for a leave of absence.”

“Do you usually offer your teachers paid holiday for murdering people?” Snape asked.

Dumbledore didn’t choose to respond to this. He looked up from his parchment and managed a grave smile. “How are you, Severus?”

Snape didn’t seem to like this question, because he dismissed it instantly with the words: “I’ll live.”

“You’re quite good at replying to questions without really answering them, aren’t you?”

Snape just raised his eyebrows. “If you say so. Sir.”

Dumbledore almost smiled, but his heart was obviously too heavy, because it turned into a sigh as soon as it touched his lips. “What can I do for you, Severus?”

“I want to know…” Snape stopped himself. He was talking without opening his lips very wide, as though he thought he’d be seized by the urge to scream, or vomit, if his jaw was ever unclenched. “What have you done with the boy?” he went on. “Is he…” his mouth twisted into a grimace, “safe?”

Dumbledore sat back in his chair and scanned Snape with those penetrating blue eyes. “Perfectly,” he said. “He is with Lily’s sister, Petunia.”

There was a pause. The grimace intensified. “She would not have wanted that.”

Dumbledore continued to look at Snape with benign curiosity. “In order to justify myself in this matter,” he began, “I will need to talk about how she died. Will that bother you?”

Snape gave him a look of contemptuous fury. “Nothing you can say will upset me,” he growled.

Dumbledore smiled. “I’m delighted to hear it. Well, then, Severus, I believe the boy survived because Lily sacrificed her life for him. Her sacrifice caused Voldemort’s curse to re-bound off its intended victim, and strike him instead.”

“Did she know” – again, he had to pause, as though he was fighting the urge to be sick – “what she was doing?”  

“She could not have known that Voldemort would offer to spare her life. She was muggle-born; she did not expect mercy. But she was always a quick-thinker. I believe she realized that Voldemort would underestimate her, would disregard any threat she posed – therefore she played up to his expectations. She played the role of a frightened, muggle mother, begging for her son’s life, so that he would not suspect her intentions.” Dumbledore paused: Snape’s shoulders were hunched. He was curling in on himself, but there were no tears in those fierce, unhappy eyes. “Again, I am only guessing, Severus,” he went on, in a gentler tone. “We may never know for sure. At any rate, her sacrifice means that some form of magical protection will always exist for Harry in those who share Lily’s blood. I wrote to Petunia, informing her of this, and she has been so good as to take him in. I really do not think he would be safe anywhere else.”

“Not even here?” Snape asked impatiently.

“Who has time to bring him up in the middle of a school?”

“Anyone,” Snape growled. “Anyone would have more time for him than Petunia Evans.”

“It’s Petunia Dursley now. She married.”

“She married?”

“Yes. She has a child of her own, roughly Harry’s age. She will be well equipped to take care of him.”

“I don’t understand you.” Snape stopped himself again. His voice was wavering, either with fury or grief. With a painful effort, it seemed, he pulled himself together. He put his hands on Dumbledore’s desk, and spoke in a low growl. “You say that there are worse things than death, and then you inflict one of them on the Potter boy just to keep him alive.”

“Petunia Dursley is worse than death?” Dumbledore queried politely.

“You don’t know her,” he muttered hoarsely.

“There is no other way, Severus.” This was spoken with an air of finality that Snape seemed to recognize, because he took his hands off Dumbledore’s desk, and folded them in again, with a convulsive motion. He then walked over to the window, squinting hatefully in the glare of the sunlight, and the almost equally overwhelming glare of the students’ happiness. The sound of their excited games was echoing through the castle, and it was even starting to make the young Severus feel sick.   

“Lily and James’ funeral is on Sunday,” Dumbledore resumed, in the same careful tone. “Will you be coming?”

“Is that a joke?” Snape snapped.

“Never mind, then,” said Dumbledore. “The boy will be safe, Severus. And I do not doubt that there will be plenty of opportunities for you to save him, once he is grown.”

“He will be beyond saving, if you let him grow up with that woman.”

“He has a lot of his father in him. Haven’t you always maintained that James was immune to criticism? Perhaps Harry will be the same.”

“What a comforting thought,” Snape observed drily. He swept out of the door without looking back, adding, “I will be at work on Monday, Dumbledore. I don’t need your pity,” before closing the door behind him.
Continuing from White in the Moon. This is part one of Snape's flash-forwards (future flash-backs? Would that be a better thing to call them? Dear me, this is getting complicated!) The second part will (hopefully) follow in the next couple of days. Stay tuned for a meeting with adult Malfoy in Part Two!
This chapter was tricky to write. Now I know why J.K. Rowling never had Harry visiting his own memories, because the multiplicity of Harry's would get confusing! I hope it's obvious which Snape is doing what in this chapter. Wherever possible, I've tried to call the young one Severus, and the older one Snape.
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I'm terrible, but I found Snape saying that Petunia was worse than death hilarious, despite the gravity of the situation.