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𝚅𝙸 >> 𝚃𝙾 𝙳𝙸𝙶 𝚄𝙿 𝙰 𝚂𝙻𝚄𝙶

< 4 WEEKS, 2 DAYS >

His second apology was to Lily Evans.

His heart beat violently as he walked out into the yellow and orange of late October, the leaves seeping into the roots of chasmic reality, churning against one another and metamorphosing the ground to a dark, forgiving red. It was his seventh year. He'd lost her friendship two years before.

She was still just as beautiful, just as unselfish and amiable as she had always been. The dissimilarity was that she no longer laughed with him sitting beside her. She no longer wrote sentences in his book or read him passages of the Muggle books he'd brought from home, and she no longer sprouted him flowers from her palms, and she didn't light up whenever he appeared. No, she was rather downright seceded, her iceberg a pole away from his own, and he knew that if it were possible to push it any farther away, she would.

She sat next to James Potter in the courtyard, curled up on the ground and leaning against his arm. They were smiling at each other, talking subduedly about things Severus couldn't hear. He hated that she was happy there. He hated how she'd fully become what the boy fancied her to. He slunk softly towards them, taking a breath to sturdy his quivering knees, his hand curling into a fist, his heart pulsing thickly in the meat of his thumb.

As if she knew he was coming, as if she were every god and every universe and every knowing thought, Lily stopped talking, pulling her robes tighter around her chilly arms as Severus stepped up behind them, falling completely silent and staring out at absolutely nothing. Snape felt a barrier lock its way around her, momentarily stopping him and making him wonder if it would be indecent in such a case to trespass through. Not to say he wasn't a generally indecent person; he just didn't want her to think so.

He put the question on the back-burner. Now wasn't the time for questioning decency; it was the time for debriefing schisms. With a soft step and a hushed breath, he became nearer. He crossed the border she hadn't wanted him to enter. He had to see her. And, as she turned even farther away, he became more and more certain of it, until he was just as assured as the flipping of the leaves themselves that the murky water they were deluged in was never befouled to begin with. He just had to let her know.

"Lily," Severus said. It was soft, gentle. The kind of tone that would typically make her warm up and give anyone the brightest smile in the world. But instead she became unforgivingly rigid, looking darkly down at her black dress shoes and seeming to covet that she wasn't there. Even her hair, though more lambent red than the leaves themselves, seemed to dampen in shade, allaying with her as she ignored him until the entire world was almost completely blue.

James slung a protective arm around her shoulders. It made Snape simmer at his very sutures. As if he was dangerous. As if Potter could save her from it. If he wasn't so composed, Severus' fist would have by now left its sleeve. His knuckles would have planted their roots into the form of James Potter's square jaw, replacing the teeth that rested in it with empty air and the taste of salted, metal blood. But Severus wouldn't do it. He decided he couldn't accede to becoming his own father.

He ignored the gesture, keeping his focus on Lily and reinstating his purpose. He could tune James out. After the years of provocation from the boy, he knew for certain he was quite good at this already.

"I wish to speak to you."

His eyes softened as they trailed over the part of Lily's face he could still see — the outline of the ductile, cold-reddened cheek, the lashes of the downward-pointed eye, declining him as blatantly as they could bear — and he could see her think. Yes, as unobstructed as the sun itself, sifting through the outstretched leaves around them, was the inner conflict of Lily Evans as she sat in the dead yellow grass and pondered on what she was to say.