lesser beings would call it fate

i, being poor, only have my dreams

Lesser beings would call it fate. Snape calls it an accident, and holds it tight.

.

.

.

"She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree."
William Butler Yeats

~~~

i. it starts in Godric's Hollow

It starts in Godrics' Hollow. That silent graveyard where the ghosts whisper in the wind, chattering in his ear as his black robes skim the dead grass. Spirits nip at his ankles in a serpentine manner, hunting him, calling him. Severus Snape stands before a stone white grave, that declares so absurdly that the last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death.

How dare it? How dare it tell him there is a life beyond Death? That Lily Potter dared to die to live again elsewhere. She ought to be here, so Snape may have something to cling on to in this world that is worth it. A reason to walk and live and breathe and exist, as it were.

But the cemetery doesn't do it. It doesn't quench that itch, that thirst, that urge that arises every so often and drags him here, before the hidden bones and forgotten memories. There are too many ghosts here, and the silence is far too loud.

***

"Tell me about the Dementors again, Sev," Lily sighs. Her red hair's splayed out around her, so bright against the green.

He sighs too, but tells her, all to see that smile on her face, that fascinated glint in her eyes. Dementors are morbid, miserable things, and somehow she makes them the most wonderous things to talk about.

"Wouldn't it be fun to dress up as one for Halloween?" Her face scrunches up at the sky momentarily. "Tuney wants to be Elizabeth Bennet, to find her Darcy."

Severus thinks Tuney should just go as herself. She's horrifying enough. He doesn't say that out loud of course; Lily still cares for her sister and Severus cares for Lily.

"The Muggles won't know what a dementor is," he says instead.

Lily turns to look at him. His bestest friend. "Well, then we can go around saying we're hags. As long as we get loads of sweets, and I get all your nougat."

"Hags are real too," he says. "Hags and trolls and dragons."

Lily smiles, the light in her eyes dancing. "Magic is beautiful, isn't it?"

It's magic that killed her.

***

It's near the end of spring of 1983 when Snape decides to leave the ghosts in Godric's Hollow to burn under the summer sun alone.

The day he decides, he doesn't quite know where he's going. He simply lets the tug in his stomach and the pull of his mind to direct his course. He'd never thought service under the Dark Lord would spawn any such advantage, and yet Apparating without any given destination has prepared him for this.

This time, he ends up at their weeping willow, and the fallen tears of the tree shelter him for a moment as he weeps also. Here they sat and lay and talked of magic and beauty and friendship, enveloped in the ignorance of youth. Here he had fallen in love with the way the sun caught her hair on fire, her flyaway curls like spitting embers. Here he had been enchanted with her eyes, a kaleidoscope of green, endless green that made the lushest patches of grass look dead and dry.