Chapter Text
“Look… at… me…” Severus manages to breathe out and it’s hardly more than a whisper, the words slipping out of his lips in a sudden, selfish and desperate desire to see Lily’s painfully emerald green eyes again. He can’t hold back that sudden, selfish desire as it engraves itself into him as surely as he wants to live. (He had thought all of these years that he couldn’t wait for death's embrace. Even if it meant that he was going to hell for his sins. He, after all, knew that there was no way that even in death someone as despicable as him would ever see Lily again. Perhaps this was his way of seeing her… one last time, for one more moment.) Severus’ feral, nauseating and aching need to see one last glimpse of Lily before he was well and truly dead pays off, as Lily’s son looks him in the eyes one last time. Severus feels something deep within himself break, as he does every time he looks at Lily’s son. It was funny in a strangely detached sort of way, Severus thinks, because he thought that there was nothing left in him to break. Yet… yet Lily’s son never fails to pull the rug out from under his feet and pull him down and make him drown .
Harry Potter… had the same devastating effect on him that Lily did. And Severus loathed himself for it, and as such lashed out at her son. Lily’s son , who he had sworn to protect and who he had so desperately and mind-numbingly failed . Time and time again he failed Lily’s son. Her son . Her son who was more like Lily than he could handle and who tore open the floodgates of guilt, hatred and pain. Harry, who made him feel like he was drowning, with his legs sinking into the quicksand that lies beneath the ocean of emotions and pulling him down, down, down . Until he couldn’t tell which way was up and how to breathe and he no longer knew what he was doing and he hated it! He hated himself! So he lashed out at the very person who he cared the most about, after Lily’s death. Her son.
Because even looking at him was like a punch to the gut, a thousand needles stuck in his throat, a shovel prying out his ribcage and ripping apart his stomach and heart. Looking at Lily’s son blinded him, Severus could still feel the claws ripping him apart from the inside out, until they dug their trenches and bombed his mind, until he couldn’t think about anything but the pain and the hurt . Those claws would turn into thorny vines and rip their way through his throat and punch through his lips until he was spewing hatred and violently lashing out at the one last good thing he had.
Severus’ good things never lasted.
He learned that time and time again, each time he had to relearn- had to swallow that particular lesson again and again the path to learn it was paved with pain and hurt and death.
Severus didn’t deserve good things.
He learned that lesson from his fathers fists before he learned to walk.
(The only reason he wasn’t more damaged was because of his magic.)
And yet he dared to forget.
He dared to hope.
Lily’s son had his eyes locked onto his.
Severus’ heart ached, twisted and burned, and he felt like he was being picked apart atom by atom, cell by cell until there was nothing of him left. Because in the end, Harry Potter was Lily’s boy. Not Potter’s . Lily’s . Because even though Harry was Potter on a shallow, superficial level, everything else was Lily.
And at the end of the day, Severus was a bitter, selfish man and seeing Lily’s green, green eyes was the final thing he wanted in his pathetic life. Because he had lived longer without Lily than he had known her, yet he still was so, so weak and pathetic that it burned . He couldn’t handle the thought that he was disappointing Lily, never could, even when he convinced himself that he could live without thinking about her without caring he never let go of the thought of Lily . And damn him, damn him to hell! He cared. He cared so, so much that he couldn’t let anyone see it and he dug himself further and further until he died, because that was the way he was and he couldn’t handle caring .
Lily’s eyes peered at him through a shallow facsimile of James Potter's face.
And suddenly Severus wanted a fresh start. He ached for a new world, a new time, a new him . A blank slate.
Because Lily’s boy looked so, so tired .
And all Severus wanted was to be better. He suddenly didn’t care much about the fact he would have been going against Dumbledore's oath and that could have killed him. Severus suddenly didn’t fucking care. He could have taken care of Harry so much better than Petunia .
And oh, how Severus loathes Petunia. She’s just as bad as Tobias was.
Severus could still remember stepping into Harry’s mind and his mind latching onto him. Pulling him in and dragging him under. Clawing at him with the fury of a thousand suns and the precision of a thousand slicing blades. It shredded him. Every. Single. Fucking. Time . Severus remembers, without the memory being his, of sitting in a dark cupboard, cradling a broken arm and sporting bruises and aches and hurt . He remembers the detached feeling of knowing that his own family hates him, of not knowing his own fucking name .
So deep seated in Harry’s mind was the fact that he wasn’t worth it and Severus had only solidified that.
Severus lashed out. He hurt and he didn’t want Harry to hurt, but at the same time he felt like he was being flayed alive.
Severus… he could have been better.
He could have been stronger.
And Severus had never wanted anything more in the world than to just fucking restart on a clean slate. With people who don’t know him and with Harry .
He would’ve been so much better than Petunia. The scathing bitch.
But here and now, in the dusty, rotting and decrepit shack that once housed his nightmares and now his death, there was no time, no room to wish that he could take him and Harry and flee and never come back. It’s far too late anyways and the eyes that had once been Lily’s and are now Harry’s are so full of pulls of exhaustion, sadness and grief and pity. And Severus wants nothing more than to rewind the years and let the wizarding world burn for what they have done to Harry.
Harry… who was so much like Lily, all fire and brimstone and bluntness and bravery.
The Dark Lord and Nagini are far gone and those big, achingly green eyes full of pity staring into his, and all the while Harry clutches the vial of Severus’ memories.
And the world dims and goes black all too fast.
He didn’t have enough time . Or perhaps, he had enough time, far too much in fact, for a person as vile and cruel as he. For all of Severus’ imperfections at least he wasn’t blind of his faults. He was far too aware of his bad qualities-- the fact that he was so buried in self-loathing and grief and bitterness that he lashed out on others, on children . Even as he tried to be better than his father, he was no different. Severus, in the end, became the very person that he hated so dearly. He had become his father who had looked at him and his mother like a particularly fat slug had crawled up his nose every time he saw them. Every glance and every look was full of disgust that he had to put up with people he deemed so… nauseating .
Severus vaguely remembers a poem that Lily had written and read to him once, he had found it dark and macabre. She had been glowing at her success in writing something she had deemed ‘perfection’ at the age of ten.
“Sometimes destruction is in your veins.” Lily’s voice echo's to him, reciting that fucking poem.
“In your blood. Burning and boiling. Blistering and hurting.” She says in a too-bright voice, practically vibrating with excitement and nerves. “Sometimes you can't outrun it, because it is a part of you as much as you are a part of it.” A breath full of jittery anxiety and fast-paced bubbling excitement.
“Sometimes it forces its way through your lips and pries apart your teeth. It crawls down your throat and tangles and coils in your lungs, and you are left asphyxiating, feeling like you're swallowing dry ice. Freezing and destructive and deadly.” A pause, and then she’d continue, “Sometimes it drowns you in a cacophony of winds whirling and dancing around you, screaming in your ears 'till you go deaf.
Pushing and prodding and cutting your strings until you have no way to reattach them.”
Severus’ feeling claws at his throat and his magic lashes out. The words echoing in his head, “Then shoving you under the bed. Into the closet. Under the rug in the parlor. Another dirty secret.” She’d pause and glance at him with an unidentifiable gleam in her eye. “It leaves you there until you rot away, long ago forgotten by the rest and never remembered. It leaves you there 'till your bones are little more than dust in the wind.” And her head would snap up, her thousand-watt grin lighting up the world despite the ghastly and frightening poem that she just read. That she had created, and she’d breathe out too fast all at once. “What do you think, Sev?”
Severus’ magic snaps back into himself too fast and much too soon and suddenly he’s breathing again, a warm weight in his arms, clutched to his chest as wind whistles in his ears. The sensation of falling, whipping around him.