you raise me up || harry potter

chapter 70

»»-----　song:　-----««

all through the night

★ by sleeping at last (cyndi lauper) ★

❝ we have no past,
we won't reach back,

keep with me forward
all through the night. ❞

♢ ♢ ♢

The day was dim when Snape finally stepped out to go home, the steeple casting a long shadow splayed across the cemetery. It fell right across a familiar headstone, one he hadn't visited in thirteen years. 

Snape plucked a dandelion from the ground at his feet. His other hand carefully opened the iron gate. 

He stood there, staring down at his parents' graves. The still summer air was suddenly disturbed by a warm gust of wind, and it wove itself through his hair before billowing upward and disappearing as quickly as it came. Eileen used to do that when he had been little, when she still had life in her; ruffle his long hair and purse her lips to exhale a gentle "whoosh." He asked her, once, why she did it.

"To blow away the bad luck, of course," she had said.

Tobias and Eileen had been buried next to each other. Snape would have forbidden it if he had any say in the matter, if he hadn't been behind bars, but what would protesting have achieved? They were dead. They weren't here, in this place. Perhaps they had gone to different places in death. But they were not here.

Still, he gently placed the dandelion atop the stone. 

Sleep well, Mum. Wherever you are. If you are.

The shadows grew longer, the light more orange, the air hazy with smoke residue and something close to longing. It was time to go home.

The Snapes had a car, once. It was beaten down and grimy past the point of recognition, and after all these years Snape could not for the life of him recall the make or model. It sat in the garage now, defunct and probably fossilized under all the junk. Snape disliked Apparition, but he hated cars even more. 

So he walked. Cokeworth wasn't exactly a tourist hub, and there was really nothing nice to look at, but the best part about it was that most people stayed home and kept their blinds and curtains shut. Walking, though Snape rarely indulged in it, could be nice when there wasn't much purpose to it and he didn't have to worry about being watched or bumping into someone who recognized him from when he and Lily would roam about the town as children.

Or someone who recognized him, period.

"Severus?"

Snape stumbled. Quite literally stumbled, and Snape vaguely registered in a moment of infuriated annoyance that there was not a rock or pothole in sight to blame his misstep on. He knew that voice, he'd know it anywhere, and the voice sounded suprised. Pleasantly surprised, even. 

The voice sounded like Remus Lupin.

Snape whipped around, and involuntarily took a few steps back. There were no robes to flair dramatically around him, no heeled boots to click menacingly. The end result, Snape guessed, made him look like a graceless spider flailing about as it desperately clung to a violently yo-yoing web, which was previously undisturbed. 

It was hard to match Lupin, his face, his smile, his whole self, really, to the place. To Cokeworth. Even with shabby Muggle corduroy and all, even with the dusty palette and brown hues, even with the amber eyes and the exhaustion plain under them, something about him did not belong in Cokeworth. He was standing ten feet away, his posture so casual and shoulders so relaxed that one would have been hard-pressed to find some evidence that he was more perturbed than he was letting on.