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Once Upon a Time

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He told her stories. There was nothing else to keep her with him. He was angry and dirty-haired, and his clothes were all too big, and the local children whispered behind their hands about his weird mum and his drunken father.

So he told her stories, in the cool basin of shade beside the canal. He tried to keep her eyes on him using words, since looks obviously weren’t going to do it. He told her about the Dementors of Azkaban, and the bloody revolt of Gellert Grindelwald. He told her about phoenixes and Floo Powder and Pygmy Puffs. He watched for the things that made her eyes light up, or made her gasp, or squeal with delighted horror.

And, when he was doing it, he felt more powerful than he ever had before. For an eleven-year-old boy who’s used to inspiring fear and disgust, if not outright derision, it’s intoxicating to see someone hanging on your every word, drawing closer to you, gasping in horror or fascination – or Lily’s usual mixture of the two – as though she sees only your words, and not your pointed, sallow face and greasy hair.

And he understood, when she got called in for her tea or dragged off by her nosy sister, how bereft his father had felt when he’d seen his bottle of whisky emptied all over the living-room floor. She would dart away with an apologetic little smile but, when they next met, she would always remember where they’d left off. Without so much as a “Hello, Severus. How are you?” she would leap back into the story.

“Go on – you were telling me about Slytherin’s fight with the other school Founders.”

And he would laugh at her enthusiasm, or pretend he’d forgotten the story, because he didn’t know how to talk to people without being a little bit cruel. Those parts of his nature were difficult to rein in.

In years to come, every time he held a classroom in a breathless hush – under a pall of fear so thick he could almost touch it – it was a pale echo of this thrill. While he talked about the subtleties and intricacies of potions, and saw their eyes grow glassy with fear – because they were dreading being questioned on all this information, but they were too terrified of incurring his wrath to risk dropping their eyes in order to write any of it down – his pulse would quicken with the sudden conviction that he mattered.

But it wasn’t the same. Lily hadn’t been frightened of him. Fear was just something she played with. She felt a thrill in it, because it didn’t own her – the same thrill she felt in listening to other people, because they weren’t a threat to her. She could smile at Potter’s pig-headed arrogance, or Mary MacDonald’s shrill stupidity, because none of that worried her. She could look fear in the face and make notes about its features. She would draw closer at the gruesome parts of the stories. That was the incredible thing about Lily. She was gentle as a lamb, and always would be, but she reveled in the excesses of other people’s behavior. Her eyes lit up with the thrill of a riddle – a challenge for her empathy – whenever he described the bad guy of the story.  

He soon learned that she liked stories of heroic last-stands, or intolerant authority figures getting outsmarted. She wasn’t a romantic little girl – although, when he’d told her the story of the Fountain of Fair Fortune, she’d grinned triumphantly when Amata married the muggle, Sir Luckless.

Snape’s mother had always skated over that bit on the rare occasions she’d ever read to him.

They took refuge with each other. Severus didn’t find affection anywhere else, and Lily didn’t find sense anywhere else. Imagine listening to the brainless twitterings of that horse-faced sister twenty-four hours a day!

He told her about Nearly Headless Nick, with his head hanging on by two inches of ghostly flesh and sinew. Or the mysteriously blood-stained ghost of Slytherin House – or Thestrals – black, skeletal horse-creatures that only appeared to you if you had seen someone die. He talked about possessed limbs and re-animated corpses – wizards who kept their hearts in little boxes, where they grew hairy and twisted through lack of use. And the giant spiders who lived in the jungles of Borneo. She hadn’t liked that. She’d taken to glancing over her shoulder, or rubbing her neck nervously. But Severus, partly because he loved having the power to soothe her, and partly because he wanted her undivided attention again, assured her that they were never found in Britain.

And all that was fine, when it had only been his voice she listened to. But now her ears were filled with other voices, competing arguments, Gryffindor propaganda and Slytherin abuse. He couldn’t wrap the world round his little finger anymore: there was simply too much of it. There were too many chaotic, hungry, grasping, selfish people: they didn’t care about the symmetry of the plot. And they certainly didn’t care about the central love story.

The problem was, she loved all those competing voices, all those differences of opinion. She loved the variety – the bright, tender chaos of it. Even the bigotry and prejudice seemed to interest her. She wasn’t looking for one truth that superseded all the others.

In that basin of shade, he’d been drunk on the power, the attention. But now they were in a world where hundreds of other people competed for her attention. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed on her with desire, and Severus couldn’t poke out every one of them: it would simply be too time-consuming.

To his everlasting humiliation, she got to see that he was powerless. He couldn’t command respect or admiration. Potter and his cronies tormented him. Even the other Slytherins sneered at him – because he was a half-blood, and he was hook-nosed and greasy-haired. The teachers were all under the spell of Potter’s arrogance and – even while they saw that Severus was clever – they disliked him. He made them uncomfortable. He had too much energy – too few scruples.

So he tried to command fear. It was literally the only way. There was nothing else he was good at. Lily was slipping away from him by slow, torturous degrees. Trying to hold on to her was like being on the rack. And then Dark magic had fluttered into the palm of his hand like a trusting butterfly, and he’d remembered Regulus Black telling him about Chaos theory. The merest flutter of a butterfly’s wings could cause a tidal wave a thousand miles away. He didn’t have to just take this. He could react. There could be a reckoning.  

Being feared was almost as good as being desired. You got to have an effect on people. You got the satisfaction of seeing them draw back when you walked past.

It was a lonely life, but in a cruel, dark, bitter way, it was satisfying. He’d always thought that the world was full of self-centred little animals, and now he knew his suspicions to be correct. There was something beguiling about knowing the direction people would turn, even if that direction was always away from you.



“Well?” Lily demanded impatiently. “Then what happened?”

She was in her bed in the Hospital Wing, still dressed in the blood-stained pink blouse that she had grabbed in desperation in order to pass as a muggle earlier that day. Severus was sitting in the chair beside her bed, with The Tales of Beedle the Bard propped open on his lap. He was reading softly, because Madam Pomfrey was in her office, and she had kept the door open a crack. He wasn’t supposed to be there. In fact, Madam Pomfrey had forbidden him from coming near Lily in a tone of barely concealed disgust. But the matron had clearly fallen asleep at her desk because, every so often, the story was punctuated by loud snores.

Severus was in his element. He knew that she had already heard all the stories in The Tales of Beedle the Bard, so he would throw in little extra details to surprise her, shock her, or make her laugh.

They were reading The Warlock’s Hairy Heart. It was his favourite story – of course it was – all that dark magic and invulnerability – but, this time, the maiden was fighting back against the hairy-hearted warlock who wanted to exchange her pristine heart for his own. There was an exciting fight ranging all over the castle. Lily was secretly marveling at the number of curses he’d been able to weave into this story.   

He gave her a look of polite puzzlement. “What happened when?”

“In the story!”

“Oh.”

He took his time going back to the book, and finding his place on the page. Lily rolled her eyes. He was always pretending to have lost his place, or forgotten the story. The more eager she got, the more forgetful he became. It was cruel, but it was Sev’s ground level of cruelty. You couldn’t get nicer than that from him, and it was, in any case, kind of exciting.     

Then,” he said at last, “you went to sleep and got better, so that you didn’t have to spend another night in the Hospital Wing, under the beaky nose of Madam Pomfrey.”

Lily glared at him. She decided to let the ‘beaky nose’ comment slide. It was, for Severus, very mild abuse – practically praise. And he’d had a hard day. “I’m not tired,” she said sternly.

Snape raised his eyebrows. “That’s not what it says here.”

“Sev!”

“Honestly!” he protested, holding up the page for her inspection. “You don’t believe me? See for yourself. This is how the story ends. Who are you to argue with Beedle the Bard?”

Lily looked at the page. It was there, all of it – in exactly the same font as the rest of the story. Even the part about Madam Pomfrey's beaky nose.

She gave him a look of irritated admiration. That really was extraordinary magic! If only he had more confidence – if only he would stop hanging around with creeps like Avery and Mulciber – if only he didn’t spend all his time and energy trying to get Potter expelled – he could be such a brilliant wizard!  

“I didn’t even see you pick up your wand,” she muttered.

“That’s because you’re tired,” he replied simply.

“You’d better be able to change this back. Madam Pince will strangle me.”

He shrugged. “I like this ending better. Less messy.”

“You can’t just go changing the endings of beloved children’s stories!” she protested.

He treated her to another look of innocent surprise. “Apparently, I can. Do you want to see the new ending of Babbity Rabbity? You should be over eighteen, really - ,”

Lily succumbed to the giggles that she’d been fighting off for the past five minutes.

Severus really was in his element. She saw the corners of his mouth turning treacherously upwards, but he was – as usual – trying to yank them down into a scowl. The grin kept creeping back, though, whenever he wasn’t paying attention. It was wonderful to watch.

“Now, go to sleep,” he said sternly.

Lily was gripped with unexpected panic. She was tired, but she didn’t want to be left alone with the memories of Trafalgar Square littered with muggle bodies. And his voice was unspeakably comforting. She loved listening to his stories, whenever she was tired or afraid. She wanted to hear him making sense of the world for her – making it grim and grand, dark and dramatic, but all of it somehow bent in on her - like a shadowy canopy protecting her, but also shutting her in. It was as though she was the axle on which the whole world turned but, because of that, she never got to move or travel or change. It made her feel terrified and yet desperately needed.

“No, no, no!” she whispered, as he got up to leave. “Just tell me one more story! Tell me what happened when you met the Lockharts.”

Snape narrowed his eyes suspiciously. She was always asking to hear about that. As Lucius Malfoy's on-again, off-again friend, he got to meet lots of minor celebrities. Gilderoy Lockhart had just finished his first book - a very heroic tale of Albanian werewolf hunting - and, consequently, every rich pure-blood wanted to know him. Severus had been sickened by this meeting, but Lily had never really been able to understand why.

“You mean the blonde bimbo and his wife, the slightly blonder bimbo?”

“He’s not a blonde bimbo!” she whispered, shocked. “He’s done great things!”

Severus scowled. “He’s a shallow imbecile. His wife looks like a Playwizard pin-up.”

“Maybe he’s very much in love with the pin-up,” said Lily reasonably. “Pin-ups need just as much love as the rest of us, you know. More, probably.”

Severus let his expression thaw just enough to permit an exasperated smile. “Why more?”

“Well, because people are always using them for their bodies.”

“The poor things,” said Snape dryly.

Lily wasn’t going to be so easily deterred. She knew Severus well; and she would never have got a chance to know him this well if she couldn’t wade through the thickest, darkest sarcasm. “Women who look like she does… well, it’s probably hard to find a man who’ll value her for her intellectual worth.”

“With this particular woman, it’s impossible. Unless you have a very broad definition of intellectual worth”

“I think maybe you should consider the possibility that yours is a bit too narrow.”  

Snape raised his eyebrows again. “You know, if anyone overheard that, they could get the wrong idea about me.”

Lily collapsed into giggles once more, but she broke off with a wince, because her ribs felt as though they were stabbing through her skin. She wasn’t quick enough to hide the grimace from Severus. His dark eyes turned suddenly darker, and his jaw locked into place. It was as though that creeping grin had never existed.

“It still hurts, doesn’t it?”

Lily didn’t feel like answering him directly. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with your potion,” she said.  

“I know there’s nothing wrong with my potion. That’s what’s worrying me. Are you sure none of the curses you healed today were infectious?”

Lily heaved her aching shoulders into a shrug. “It’s just stress.”

Severus looked at her, half-fuming and half-businesslike. He was silent for a moment, as though making up his mind about something, and then he said:

“Sit up. I want to try something.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked doubtfully.

She knew immediately that this had been the wrong thing to say. He was worried. The very last thing he needed now was to be mistrusted.  

“Just sit up,” he said slowly.

Lily did as he asked. It was agony, after she’d been lying in the same position for so long, to ease herself upright, but she didn’t let it show on her face.     

Severus sat on the bed beside her. He traced the tip of his wand over her skin, moving from her collar bone to the nape of her neck, and then down her spine, muttering under his breath as he did so. It was as though he was mapping out her bones, or maybe tracing the path-ways of her veins. In the wake of his wand, she felt a kind of unknotting– as though every taut muscle in her body was springing back with a blissful shudder of relief. It was like sinking into warm water – and there was a similar rushing in her ears, although that might have just been caused by his closeness. The touch of his wand left a slipstream of calm behind it. All the aching was soothed – all the tightness loosened.

Completely disarmed, she murmured his name, and then saw him stop, frowning with concentration, until he could collect himself and go on again.  

She noticed, as he came to her torso, and carefully traced his wand over each of her ribs, that he was breathing heavily through his nostrils. His jaw was locked, and he was looking at her with that same, bewildering expression of fierce tenderness she had grown to recognize. He was half-snarling and half-pining. All that greed was offset by such a look of forlorn longing that it made her want to throw her head back and laugh. He was so ridiculous! What did he think he needed to fear from her? What did he think could ruin this? Let him snarl all he wanted, he was still her Severus. Nobody was going to come running in and snatch her away. The only person who could take her away from him was him.     

By the time he stopped, she was smiling broadly, and feeling the happy fog of sleep drift across her vision.  

“How do you feel now?” he asked, in a voice that was firmly clipped and controlled.

“Much better,” she murmured.

“Good. Now go to sleep.”

“Severus,” she muttered, with sleepy alarm, as he extended his hand to switch off the lamp beside her bed. “You’re trembling.”  

“What’s your point?” he snapped.

Lily, too bewildered to be angry, could only point out the obvious. “I guess my point was: are you alright?”

His expression softened. “Of course it was. Sorry. I’m used to dealing with… people who aren’t you.”

“That must be why you’re so miserable all the time,” she said brightly.

Severus just switched the light off. For the next few moments, until her eyes adjusted to the darkness, his expression was a complete mystery to her. But then she began to make out his features in the gloom. He was still breathing heavily.

“Will you show me how you did that?” she asked, as her eyelids drooped.

“Tomorrow.”

“It’s not dark magic, is it?”

“How could it possibly be dark magic?” he asked patiently. “Who does it hurt?”

Lily allowed him to push her backwards on to the bed. “You’re brilliant, you know,” she murmured. It was a childish, impulsive thing to say, but her mother had always taught her that you had to say these things, even if they seemed obvious, or your loved ones might go around not knowing.

He laughed softly. “You Gryffindors say the funniest things.” Then his expression darkened, and he added. “Well, some of you do.”

“Do you like me?” Lily murmured.

The corners of his mouth twisted upwards slightly. “You’re alright.”

“’Cause I like you…”


And then she was asleep.

Severus watched her for a few moments, until her breathing became deep and regular, and then he breathed out. His head was swimming. Every inch of him was aching with desire. But he hadn’t let her see it. He wondered even now if that was a good thing. How was anything ever going to happen between them if he always treated her like she was an optional extra in his life – just a cameo role with a few lines and a swift exit?

Well, everyone else had a swift exit. Except the bad guys – they never knew when to leave. But it would be dangerous to assume that Lily was going to stay any longer than the rest of them. Especially now that Potter was buzzing around her like a lecherous fly.

He let his eyes drift over to the slightly open door that led to Madam Pomfrey’s Office, from which smooth, regular snores were still proceeding. Some people never seemed to have any trouble sleeping – no matter how many spirits they crushed during the day.  

Severus felt his insides curl with resentment. That bitch had dragged Lily off to a war-zone, made her work until she was aching to her bones, and then carried her away to the Hospital Wing before he’d even been able to make sure she was alright. Before she’d even been able to tell him that the blood-stains on that frilly pink blouse weren’t hers.

Everyone thought they could just walk all over him.

Well, if he couldn’t make them respect him, the very least he could do was ensure that they lost a few hours’ sleep.

He cast a Disillusionment Charm over himself and tiptoed to the doorway. It was instinct, by now. He’d gotten used to moving without making a sound, living without drawing attention to himself; it was what made him such a perfect spy. The Disillusionment Charm had probably been unnecessary. He was part of the shadows now; nobody ever looked in his direction if they could help it – unless it was to sneer or tell him to keep away. He was only detectable to the bullies of the world. And Lily. But her super-human eyesight couldn’t last forever.   

He hadn’t been lying to her, really. The part where he took away the pain wasn’t dark magic. It was just that the pain had to go somewhere. There were rules. The spell was for transferring pain. Over hundreds of years, wizards had learned that, if you happened to be injured in a fight, you could get out of it a lot quicker if you got rid of all that inconvenient pain. And maybe gave it to the even more inconvenient people who were trying to kill you.

You could draw the pain up into your wand, but you couldn’t keep it there forever. Severus had seen wands shatter into hundreds of splintery pieces, or spontaneously combust, if they were forced to house that pain for any longer than a few minutes.

And Madam Pomfrey had been cruel today.

He peered around the doorway, to see her slumped in her chair.

Severus didn’t like medical offices. They reminded him of that vision he’d been shown on Azkaban, of his beaten mother seeking help from Bernadette Potter, and getting told to draw a curse down on her head to save her unborn son.

Lily would be mad. But Lily didn’t understand. That wasn’t a bad thing. He liked that she didn’t understand. It was one of her most endearing qualities. But, unfortunately, it also meant that he couldn’t explain to her why some people in the world deserved to have the smug, complacent smiles wiped off their faces.  

Muttering under his breath, he cast the pain into her body. She shuddered in her sleep, but didn’t wake. She would be aching all over when she did – aching beyond the amendment of any potions or charms.  

They should learn what it felt like, to be aching all the time. It might make these Gryffindor creeps a bit more humble.

And then, keeping to the shadows out of pure habit, he crept back to the Slytherin common-room.
An extra chapter, following on from Sympathetic Magic [link] but before the Soulless Redhead [link] (I can never write anything in order!).
This was partly inspired by :iconlilyhbp:'s beautiful painting Late Summer Afternoon: [link] , so many thanks to her for sharing her beautiful art-work with us!
© 2009 - 2024 ls269
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Troven's avatar
Mmh... I certainly like this chapter as well =)
Again, very beautiful writing with the story-telling and so on...