Lily and the Unicorn, Part 3

Severus leaned over the Pensieve, until his long nose was touching the surface of the substance – whatever it was – inside. It was like cloud; it cooled and condensed into drops on his skin. He was already feeling numb with cold, since Idris Mulligan had taken his school uniform, and led him through a series of visions in which the warmth of human kindness did not feature prominently. His future, she had said: where Lily was dead, and he had to spend all his time defending a really annoying school-boy, and putting up with Dumbledore’s over-confident talk about ‘the greater good’. Where the height of Snape’s ambition was to have died years ago.

It was getting worse. A few hours ago, he had wanted nothing more than to die before Lily; a few minutes ago, he’d wanted to die years ago, before he’d had a chance to betray Lily. The despair was catching up. It was snapping at his heels. And pretty soon he’d be wishing he could die right now, and Idris Mulligan would be handing him a knife and saying she’d told him so.  

Only Malfoy and Narcissa had managed to be happy in that horrible future, and they didn’t exactly have the odds stacked against them. How could rich, beautiful pure-bloods contrive to be unhappy?  

But it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. When Severus had last seen Malfoy, he’d been lying unconscious on the floor of a building that was being consumed by Foe Fire. And Lily was supposed to die tonight – Caladrius had said so – not some years in the future, on the lawn of a smoking house, with her eyes wide open.

Don’t. Don’t think about that.

She’s messing with your head. She’s trying to get you to give up. But the joke’s on her, because she’s no nearer to finding Lily.

But neither are you.

And Idris Mulligan isn’t the only one who wants to kill her.   

As he peered into the silvery substance in the Pensieve, Severus could feel his doubts pulling him down, making his thoughts stumble. Maybe Caladrius had made a mistake. Maybe he’d been sensing someone else’s death when he’d said Lily was going to die tonight. Maybe she would marry Potter, and have his chirping, idiotic, whiny son.

Why wouldn’t she? James Potter was a Gryffindor Quidditch hero; he had his own fan-club. Half of Godric's Hollow belonged to his family; they had their own floor in Gringotts to accommodate their teetering piles of Galleons and their magical antiques.

And Severus was just a greasy-haired misfit who nobody respected.

It was strange how cyclical, how repetitive, his thoughts got when he was depressed. Everything came back to the idea that nobody respected him, that everyone was trying to manipulate him. But he never got bored. The truth was still the truth, no matter how many times you said it.

Severus felt a gentle pressure on his arm, and looked up at Idris Mulligan, with her spiky, fairytale collar, and her clumped, clotted lipstick. She was looking at him with a strange mixture of triumph and sympathy. Severus felt sick at the sight of it. He’d rather be dead than have the pity of these self-righteous morons.     

Either the cloud swept up out of the bowl and engulfed him, or he was pulled down into it: he couldn’t tell which. But, whatever happened, the substance in the Pensieve surrounded him, nipping at his skin.

Then the cloud began to thin into ragged scraps, and Severus was able to take in his surroundings.

They were in a dimly-lit office, in some kind of white-walled building. The place had an institutional feel – it was very sparse, and reeked of disinfectant. But there were notes of Wormwood, Amaranth and Armadillo Bile underneath the antiseptic fug. He immediately got the feeling that, despite the filing-cabinets and electric lamps, this office did not belong to a muggle.

Severus had a keen nose – and, having spent most of his life in the potions dungeon, sheltering from light and humiliation, he was an expert at recognizing these odours.

The shelves were lined with labeled glass bottles, and Severus scanned them absent-mindedly, while he waited for the next nightmare vision. There was hellebore, unicorn hair, even Rosura (this memory must have taken place in the days when it was still being prescribed for jaundice).

With a surreal jolt in his stomach, he saw the light from the street-lamps outside filtering through the office blinds, striping the ceiling amber.

There was no time to analyze this bizarre coincidence, because a woman entered the office, wearing the lime-green robes of a St Mungo’s healer. She had gold-blonde hair and hazel eyes. Severus seemed to have seen them before somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where, until the Healer sat down behind her desk, and the electric lamp-light caught her ID badge. It read ‘Bernadette Potter’.  

She glanced over a few files, passed a weary hand over her fore-head, and then started up in alarm as the office-door opened again. Severus just had time to register that she was pregnant, before he turned his eyes to the figure standing in the doorway, and the world fell apart.  

“Eileen!” gasped Bernadette Potter.   

Severus stared. It was his mother. Her face was still bony and taught, still dappled with violet bruises, but there were fewer lines around her eyes and mouth – and her hair was a pure, raven-feather black, not yet flecked with grey. She had obviously been out in the rain, because that vivid hair was plastered to her forehead and shoulders. She was wrapped in a green velvet shawl – slightly ragged; the rich fabric was balding in places – and she, too, was visibly pregnant.

But it was so strange. She didn’t have the simmering, distracted look that Severus had come to expect, as though she was permanently dwelling on past humiliations. Severus had never seen her looking so present, so immediate and alert.  

“Bernie,” said Eileen Snape, and Severus was astonished to hear a note of grim fondness in her voice –the kind he always heard when she said his own name.

“What’s happened to you?” Bernadette Potter demanded. She was obviously not used to seeing Eileen in this state. Severus felt a bizarre prickle of amusement at this innocence.   

“It doesn’t matter,” Eileen insisted. “Please – tell me if the baby’s alright.”

Bernadette Potter rushed out from behind her desk, drawing a wand from her belt, and ran it over Eileen’s belly, like an ultra-sound scanner. There was a barely-audible gasp – it could have come from either of them – and then silence.

“What’s happened?” Bernadette said again, in a smaller voice.

Eileen obviously didn’t want to talk about that. “You can save him, can’t you?”

“Did – did your husband do this?”

“Yes, alright?” Eileen snapped. “And don’t say you told me so! Can you save my son?”

The distress that he’d heard in Bernadette Potter’s voice hardened into professionalism. “I’m sorry, Eileen,” she said. “If you’d come to me sooner...”

Eileen sank into the chair in front of the desk with a sigh. She looked as though she didn’t have the strength for anguish.  

Bernadette hovered beside her. The professionalism was giving way to anger. “Why did you wait?” she demanded. “You’ve been injured – both of you – for hours!”

“I had to take the train,” Eileen murmured. “You can’t Apparate or use the Floo Network when you’re pregnant.”

“But why didn’t you go to a muggle hospital?”

“I’m not going to one of those poisoning muggle doctors!” Eileen spat. “They’d have taken him away from me.”

“Not four months prematurely, they wouldn’t,” Bernadette growled.

Eileen looked up hopelessly. With a thrill of cold fear, Severus realized that she was looking at the stripes of amber street-light on the ceiling. “There must be something you can do,” she moaned.

“I’m sorry,” said Bernadette. “He’s dying.”

“So take him out!”

“He’d still die,” she replied calmly. “Only quicker.”

“But there must be something,” Eileen whispered. It was like a childish wish that she was half-ashamed to utter.

“Eileen,” Bernadette leaned down to touch her face, but Eileen started away with a suspicious movement that Severus would grow to recognize and, eventually, emulate.

“I don’t care if it kills me,” she muttered. “Think how you’d feel. Imagine if it was your little boy.”

“I don’t want to!” Bernadette snapped.

She sat down behind her desk, and sank her face into her hands. But when it emerged, it was tearless. Those hated hazel eyes were quite dry. They were staring at the bottle of unicorn hair on the shelf behind Eileen.

“You could drink unicorn blood,” she murmured, as though in a serene, calm, pitiless trance. “It would keep your child alive.”

Eileen stared at her. “But there’s a curse,” she protested.

“Theoretically,” said Bernadette Potter, “you would absorb the curse, and your son the life. You would be the one who actually kills the unicorn, so the guilt would be yours.”

“He wouldn’t… inherit it?”

“I don’t know, Eileen. I’ve never heard of a pregnant woman drinking unicorn blood before, and for good reason. But you asked me what I’d do. And that’s it. Kill an innocent to save an innocent.”

She leaned forward, and covered Eileen’s hand with her own. “At the very least, it’s a chance. Even if he’s cursed, he’ll be alive. Misery is better than nothing.”

“How would you know?” Eileen muttered resentfully.

“A strong soul could overcome it,” Bernadette insisted. “A strong soul could dig its way out, in spite of everything.”

“How long do I have?” Eileen asked.

“It’s difficult to say. Three hours, perhaps.”  

Severus looked at her with horrified fascination. She was a strange woman, Bernadette Potter – at once tender and exasperated – hard and soft by turns, just like Lily. He supposed it came of being a Healer. But Lily would never suggest anything like that, would she? Kill an innocent to save an innocent. It didn’t make any sense – if one innocent had to die, why not let it be the one that was dying anyway? The one that nature – or, anyway, a drunken bastard from Lancashire – had marked out for the grave.

The scene faded, and Severus found himself in the middle of a night much like the one in which he’d seen Lily’s body on the lawn outside her burning cottage. Raindrops and autumn leaves were being whipped viciously through the air, and the pregnant Eileen Snape was lifting her hands to shield her eyes against the rain as she struggled over the muddy ground. The half-skeletal branches of the Forbidden Forest were looming overhead. And Severus could see the silhouette of the Hogwarts castle – the building that was to become so beloved and so hated - on the hill above them.

Hogwarts was like Spinner’s End, a place of longing and resentment, where nothing was forgotten, but nothing ever got resolved. It was a place of simmering potential and scalding memory, where the future and the past were so vivid they were almost physically present, but all the business of living and dying took place elsewhere. Your school-days were a dress rehearsal for life but, in the end, when the final curtain was coming down, they were all you could think about. You realized that the dress rehearsal had been the performance, only you hadn’t known at the time, and the rest of your life, and maybe even your death, was where you dealt with the aftermath; the reviews, the sweeping-up, the angry demands for refunds.  

But maybe anywhere he lived would become like that, because he was cursed. The business of living and dying had to take place far away from him. And the curse wasn’t about misery – although, Merlin knew, he had suffered enough of that – it was about irresolution. It wasn’t that bad things happened to you, but that nothing happened to you. Things just went on, in discontented, unspoken resentment, the way they had for his mother. You were forever teetering on the edge of the action, on the edge of progress, on the brink of realization, but you couldn’t topple over into it.  

Lily had once said that human progress was two steps forward and one step back. It was slow but they were, at least, going in a direction, rather than dancing on the spot. And it was the right direction, as far as she was concerned. Even with half the school calling her a mudblood, even with the murderous rise of the most powerful dark wizard in history, she’d still had faith in the human race.

And she would, right up until the moment when she would see the green light speeding towards her, and feel the rush of oncoming death sweeping her hair back off her shoulders. But, even then, she would face it with her eyes open, looking for the bright side.

It was better for her to die tonight. Misery was not better than nothing; he was not-quite-living proof of that.   

The vision was splintered in the darkness and half-swallowed by the howling of the wind. He could hear his mother’s ragged breathing, and see the glowing white of a unicorn lying on the ground. Eileen was leaning over it, crying and wiping her mouth. And a Sycamore leaf had settled on the dead beast’s neck. Severus shuddered.  

Idris Mulligan’s hand on his shoulder again – reeking of Dementors – and the memory faded, to be replaced by the blue Azkaban cell, where dripping water, and absent-minded howling was the closest you could get to silence. Still, for Snape’s ragged frame of mind, it was an awful lot too close. He didn’t want to have to hear his own thoughts.  

He staggered slightly, and reached out a hand to steady himself against the dripping stone walls. There was a pounding in his head, and a weight on his shoulders, as though he was holding up the sky, like Atlas. Idris Mulligan was talking, but it took the words a long time to reach him.

“What does your mother’s Patronus look like, Severus?”

“It’s a unicorn,” he murmured, above the pounding of his head, and the hollow, sucking feeling in his chest. “I always thought it stood for lost innocence.”

“In a more literal way than you expected, I daresay it does.”  

Severus frowned. He tried to concentrate on something outside of him, but he wasn’t sure that any of this was outside of him anymore. He had been trying to remember something, hadn’t he? It had been something about Lily.

He couldn’t believe what his mother had done. Part of him wanted to believe it, because it justified the notion he’d always had that the world was persecuting him. But it wasn’t her fault. It hadn’t been malice. She hadn’t meant to ruin his life. She’d done it for love.

And then, for the first time in his life, Severus realized how dangerous love could be. He’d used it as an excuse, a justification for everything. Love would lead him to become a Death Eater, and tell Voldemort about a prophecy that would condemn Lily to death, and her annoying son to the non-existent mercy of Petunia Evans. He and his mother had both killed innocents for their love.

Earthly love was corrupt. It did lead you to do terrible things. Even the purest, the most selfless, love never did anything but harm. Mulligan was right about everything. Lily was better off without him. Without him, there would be nobody to tell Voldemort about the prophecy – nobody that Dumbledore wouldn’t mind dispatching, anyway.

But maybe the other spy wouldn’t get caught. And maybe the other spy wouldn’t ask Voldemort to spare Lily’s life. She would die like James Potter; it would be a pointless, defenseless massacre. It was too hard trying to second-guess the future. It made his head hurt.

Had it even been real? Or had it all been a hallucination to induce despair? Lily said despair itself was a hallucination – seeing real events through a distorted lens when you think you’re seeing at your clearest.

When he had told her – a hundred years ago – back in the oubliette, that Cheering Charms didn’t really make you happy; they just prevented you from remembering why you were depressed, she’d said:  

“Maybe that depression is preventing you from remembering why you’re happy. It’s not a delusion if you’re already deluded – or, anyway, not necessarily.”

That was the thing about despair. It seemed like the veil had been torn from your eyes, but it was actually just a different veil. It felt like the truth, but it was just another species of falsehood. And you had to remember – even though it was no comfort then, when you were in the grip of it – that you hadn’t always felt this way. That there would be a time, however difficult that was to imagine, when you would stop feeling this way.

After all, if you were nobody, if you were insignificant in the grand scheme of things, what business did you have losing hope? It was arrogant to assume you knew anything either way; it was the sort of thing James Potter would do.  

These were his worst nightmares, after all. These were the things he was afraid of, and consequently, saw everywhere: Potter getting his filthy hands on Lily, and Lily dying through Severus’ own neglect. His guilt and his jealousy were working on his imagination. There was nothing that tied in to verifiable fact.

Except that his mother’s Patronus was a Unicorn. And he had seen from Caladrius’ vision that Lily would marry James Potter.  

“You see now, don’t you,” said Idris Mulligan, “that my way is better?” She was breathing very quickly and Severus, without really knowing what he was doing, backed away from her, against the cold stone wall. He still didn’t know where his shirt was. “You see that the world isn’t worth clinging on to? You understand that the girl has to die tonight? The end of life is the end of pain, and it is only pain that makes humanity ugly. Death is noble and glorious; death is liberty: but pain enslaves us. Don’t give yourself a chance to betray her. Don’t give yourself the opportunity of missing her. Don’t suffer the years to bind you closer to her. The longer the charade goes on, the greater the hurt will be. You know that death’s better. You know that it always was.”

Again, Severus ignored her. There was something important he was supposed to remember. About Lily. But how could he help Lily, how could he do what was best for her, if simply living meant her death? He’d already got her tortured. He’d already got the Dark Lord to chase her half-way across the country, incinerating places with Foe-Fire and besieging schools as he went. If he was cursed, the less he had to do with her, the better.

He could make the decision that his mother hadn’t been strong enough to make. Save your loved one from pain, even if it meant their death, and yours. Death was better, wasn’t it? Better than being terrified, and begging for your son’s life, and throwing yourself in front of the curse that was meant for him? It was better than making that horrible decision to throw away everything you’d ever felt or thought, everything you’d ever been, just to save a baby that would grow up with the unfortunate handicap of looking like James Potter. And, if he died now, he’d never have to see it. That was the height of his ambition now, wasn’t it? Die before her?

“Don’t think you can change it, Severus,” she went on silkily. “This will happen no matter what you do. You’re cursed, you can’t escape that. You saw how you will end up. Guilt and grief and resentment will make you so tired that, in the end, all you can wish for is that you’d died years ago. You wouldn’t take a happy ending if it was handed to you on a plate. And the death of desire is the triumph of despair. If you love Lily, you’ll end it.”

She opened her hand, to reveal a little glass potion bottle nestling snuggly in her palm. Severus hardly needed to look to see what it was; he’d been expecting it; he’d been wishing for it.

It was Misericordial – a poison, but a tasteless, quick and gentle one. It dispatched you painlessly. It was invented by a wizard who’d read Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, and really taken the lines to heart. ‘For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death...To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

Wizards liked to think of themselves as enlightened creatures. They allowed euthanasia in their Hospitals. But the very idea that this potion might have appeared on Bernadette Potter’s shelves made it seem repulsive to Severus. And then his thoughts turned to the horrible woman’s grandson.  

“Does he survive?” he asked. His voice was ragged with fatigue, and he was cold – so cold that he couldn’t remember what warmth was anymore: everything was pain and hatred and arrogant Quidditch captains.   

“What?”

“The boy,” Severus stammered, “– Lily’s son – does he win?”

There was a silence. Severus, peering through a fog of pain, saw Idris Mulligan falter.

“Do you mean to tell me that you’d do it all again?”

“What?” he asked. Neither of them seemed to be able to get past the question that they’d just asked. Severus didn’t know, didn’t care, whether he’d do it all again; he just wanted to know whether that future-Severus, the one who hunched his shoulders constantly and couldn’t sit still, because he was always trying to distract himself from his grief, would ever be reunited with Lily.

That way was hope. That way was Lily’s approval. This was just dying in a cell at the hands of a ratchety old crone, and her probably un-sterilized bottle of potion.

But it was another decision he never got the chance to make. There was a growing light behind Idris Mulligan, who was stumbling away from him in incredulous disbelief, revolted by his stupidity, probably, or stunned by how tenacious, how masochistic, love could make you.  

Anyway, as she hurried away from Severus in a panic, she became aware of the light outside the cell, shining through the bars, rivaling the moonlight that was shining into the room from the other side. It drained all the colour from her face – even from her smeared scarlet lipstick. Severus could see each and every one of her wrinkles; they criss-crossed her face, as though she’d been scratched by a really thorough cat.

And then the door to the cell shook. The bored howling of the other prisoners ceased, leaving a completely deafening silence, broken only by the shaking of the door on its hinges.

Idris Mulligan let out a tuneless whistle, and a bird edged into the cell, through the bars of the window above Snape’s head. It was pastel-green, with magnificent tail-feathers, and Severus, from its sweet, meandering chirping, recognized it as a Fwooper: the birds that drove you insane with their beautiful song.  

The Fwooper swooped down to her, still tinkling with that wonderful sound, and when it passed over her head, a brilliant flash of light spread around them, just as whoever was outside finally succeeded in breaking the door down.

When the light receded, and Bruiser (accompanied by a silver doe Patronus) stormed into the room, both Idris Mulligan and the bird had gone.

Severus stared at the place where she’d been before the lacerating white light had engulfed her. Could you teleport with Fwoopers, just as Dumbledore could do with that wretched Phoenix of his? Or was the madness spread by the Fwooper simply catching?

“Where did she go?” Bruiser asked urgently.

“She – there was a – ,” Snape tried to pull himself together. “There was a Fwooper,” he said, his lips numb with cold.

This seemed to make sense to Bruiser, because he only raised his eyebrows and said "Have you seen enough of the other side yet to realize that I'm the good guy?"

Severus didn't reply. He was wondering half-heartedly whether Idris Mulligan had dropped the Misericordial before she'd escaped.    

And when the silver doe swept into the room, and nuzzled her insubstantial head against his knee, it wasn’t a relief. He was almost insensible of it. The idea of hope, of rescue, seemed like a cruel mockery – a surreal slap in the face. The light from the Patronus was lurid and tasteless and hurt his eyes.

It had been the same when Lily had been kissing him that dungeon classroom, and he'd been on the point of choosing between taking advantage of her, or (against every instinct) pushing her away, when Narcissa's screams had cut in and made the decision for him. Another moral choice he never got to make. A weakness he could never be accused of rising above, a problem he had never solved. A choice between destructive desire and playing it safe – and both times, circumstances had spared him the trouble of deciding.

And he wasn’t sure, either when he pulled away from Lily in the dungeon classroom, or when Bruiser and the Patronus had chased away Idris Mulligan, that he’d been on the point of doing the right thing.

Perhaps the only difference between a good person and a bad person was opportunity.

He would never have the opportunity. He was cursed. It was over. He could only be a killer; dark magic was all he was good at: nobody respected him; arrogant creeps like Potter made a fool of him; and, of course, Lily preferred them; and this was why. This was the explanation.

He was cursed. No matter how hard he worked, it would never turn out differently.

He’d always thought that it was his father’s blood that would ruin him; cursed on one side with muggle blood, and on the other with unicorn-blood. No wonder he felt that the fighting was going on in his very genes: it had been going on before he was born: it had made him what he was; the fighting had formed him.

Lily was behind the silver doe, of course: she came rushing into the cell, breathless with worry and excitement. When she saw Severus, she rushed over to him, hauled him to his feet, and then said:   

“Goblins!” Her eyes were shining with enthusiasm. “A proper goblin tribe, with ceremonial head-dresses and everything!”

Severus suddenly felt angry with her. “Well, I’m happy to see you too,” he replied irritably.   

She walked through life, taking notes on danger, peering at malice through a microscope, taking snap-shots of evil, like some kind of metaphysical tourist. Severus had to do all the worrying for her.

Every weight that gets taken off of your mind is added onto mine.

She would never suffer like he had. She just didn’t process events that way. When Lily wasn’t happy, she was dead.

No, that wasn’t true. She’d suffered at the end, hadn’t she? Begging Voldemort to spare her son’s life, hiding her pride, crying and pleading so that he wouldn’t suspect what she had in mind. She’d been prepared to die like a muggle, just to save the person she loved. Potter would never have done that. For him, bravery couldn’t be separated from spectacle. For him, heroism was shouting and blowing things up. He would never realize that you could be brave by standing by and keeping quiet – by letting someone else have the glory – someone who didn’t deserve it.  

“I was just trying to explain why we took so long,” Lily muttered, stung by his impatience.

Severus shook his head wretchedly. He staggered forward – because it was hard to walk under the weight of such a miserable future – and looked at her; drank everything in, from the muddy knees beneath her school-skirt, to the tangled but glorious red hair.

“No more talking,” he said gently.