Chapter 6 - Death Eater Boyfriend
This was not how it was supposed to happen, Lily thought as she carried her books out of the Great Hall, making her way briskly toward the library. In the spring, everything had been so clear-cut. Or perhaps it hadn’t been, but that’s what she had told herself at the time. Since then, she hadn’t given it a lot of thought, because there hadn’t been a lot to think about. Severus had chosen his path; she had chosen hers. Period. End of story.
Except that it wasn’t the end of the story. He had at first done exactly what she had expected -- sulking, ignoring her, hanging around incessantly with his Death Eater friends -- and that had been something of a relief, because she hadn’t been completely sure that she was correct about him, but how he had responded to her ending of their friendship had affirmed that decision. In the summer, Petunia had caught a glimpse of him at a local fair they had attended, just lurking around the periphery like he did with everything, and Lily had been surprised to find that she really didn’t care.
In fact, she had been annoyed: why couldn’t he just do something for a change, like a normal person, instead of slinking around watching? Why couldn’t she bump into him with a group of friends having a good time, rather than moping by himself, or hanging around with a bunch of head-cases who revered a power-mad psychopath and treated her like dirt because of her parentage? She had no interest in seeing him; she couldn’t have been less excited if Petunia had told her that Vernon bloody Dursley was around. For the past seven years, home had always been equated with Sev, but apparently she had finally gotten so fed up with him that it just wasn’t anymore.
Then they had gone back to school, and while she had done her best not to notice him, of course she couldn’t help it, not after seven years of being attuned to noticing a certain profile, a certain nervous gait, or the contrast between pale skin and black hair. Those things caught her attention as surely as a particular throaty laugh that told her that Mary was around. And before long, she had noticed that Severus was usually off by himself rather than with his customary crowd of Slytherins. Of course, this was Severus, who had spent his first five years at Hogwarts trying to polish his provincial roughness and adopt the manners and prejudices of that crowd; if he wasn’t with them, chances were that they had turfed him out. She felt a bit sorry for him, but it was his own stupid decision, and he was no longer her problem.
The puzzling thing was that he showed no signs of his old pathetic efforts to fit in with that lot. In Llewellyn’s class, where anyone who actually wanted to learn anything had to stake out prime territory at the front of the room, he sat at the front where all the swotters sat, rather than following Avery and Mulciber and Rosier around. At meal times, it was uncommon for her to see him with the people he used to spend most of his time with, and usually if that happened it was because they arrived after he did and joined him, not the other way around. Strangest of all, his old crowd still said casual hellos to him, and he always said hello back, but then walked on rather than making an effort to socialise. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she decided not to give it too much thought.
The problem was that other people kept making her think about it. Sirius Black, for example, who had interrupted her quiet after-dinner study time this evening in the Great Hall by plunking himself down opposite her and asking, “So, what happened with you and your Death Eater boyfriend? I never see you two together anymore. Did you break up?”
Lily had looked up from her Arithmancy text and stared coolly into his handsome face. “The last time I checked,” she had answered in a tone of calculated boredom, “he was neither a Death Eater nor my boyfriend.” She turned back to her book and did her best to ignore him.
Sirius was not to be ignored. “Well, if you’re missing him, I could be an acceptable substitute. I can’t pull off the Dark Mark bit, but I could go without bathing for a few days. Might be a nice change of pace.”
Lily had picked up her books, gotten up, and walked out of the Great Hall. Even if he had followed her, he couldn’t have said anything in the library without getting crucified by Madam Pince.
“What?” Sirius had called after her, mockingly and far too loudly. “Was it something I said?”
So now she was walking quickly, angrily, down the hallway to the library. There was no good answer for that sort of taunt, because even though she didn’t want to have anything to do with Severus Snape anymore, she also didn’t want to take sides against him with people who disliked him for all the wrong reasons. Since Sirius Black fell into that category, and since he was probably doing reconnaissance for Potter, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of a reply renouncing her former friend. Based on what had happened the other day in Defence, apparently the old rivalry was still going strong, and she had no interest in taking sides -- especially since Severus had apparently managed to come up with a vengeance that, unless those fleas that Professor Llewellyn had Vanished had been carrying bubonic plague, wasn’t even remotely Dark.
Too peevish and distracted to study Arithmancy anymore, she permitted herself to think about the forbidden topic. The reason she allowed it to bother her sometimes, she supposed, was that while it looked, to anyone who cared, like she had ended their friendship because of Severus’s words and beliefs, in reality her motives hadn’t been quite so pure. The decision to end their friendship had been coldly calculated in some ways: it had certainly been a long time in coming. Sev had pulled the trigger, but she had already been holding the gun -- a Muggle metaphor, she thought grimly, that he would have been ashamed to understand.
She should have known that she was reaching the end of her tether with him in fifth year, the day she had failed to stick up for him in Potions class in response to some of James Potter’s customary tormenting on the subject of hygiene. Severus had been lauded by Slughorn for excellent work on some sort of particularly difficult potion, the Draught of Peace, probably, and Potter had called over to him, “Hey Snivellus. If you’re such a genius, why don’t you invent a potion to do something about your hair? Oh wait! They’ve already made that one! It’s called shampoo!”
The inevitable uproarious laughter from the rest of the Marauders, quite a few of the Slytherins, and most of their other classmates had followed, and Lily alone had stood with Severus, who was scowling into the cauldron of potion he was decanting, lost for an answer, and probably searching for a curse. She had felt her neck and ears and cheeks growing warm as she blushed angrily -- angry at them, angrier at him -- why the hell didn’t he just clean himself up more often? Why did he leave himself open to this kind of teasing? He had turned to her to make some sort of comment about Potter, and she had found herself snapping, “Give over, Sev. You know he’s right.”
She had immediately regretted it; what was an annoyance from Potter was torture coming from her, and the look of puzzlement and misery in Severus’s eyes was not one that she had managed to forget. But he embarrassed her -- over and over and over again -- and she found herself almost wanting to humiliate him in return and then hating herself for it. He brought out the worst in her as well as the best, and her life had been a lot more placid since their break-up in the spring.
That episode in Potions class had probably been a prelude to their big fight, now that she looked back on it; it wasn't a far cry from him calling her a Mudblood like the Slytherin he was, and her mocking him and calling him Snivellus like -- well, like one of the Marauders. If the things Severus heard every day in his House had broken through and done their part to destroy the friendship, so equally had the things she heard in hers.
In occasional moments of brutal honesty, Lily realised that their friendship had ended not only because of the disturbing and hateful views he espoused, but also because he had become inconvenient. True, the possessiveness had gotten on her nerves and had turned her quirky, fascinating friend into a tiresome watchdog, and the Mudblood thing... she wouldn't be alone in believing that to be unforgiveable. She had good reasons for putting Severus behind her. It bothered her, though, that these hadn’t been the only reasons she had done it; she held herself to a high standard, and yet she knew that the decision had not been motivated purely by high-minded objections. After all, she understood him enough to know where his covetousness was coming from, and she had long since accepted and forgiven it; she knew his temper and tongue and the vocabulary of Slytherin House well enough to know that "Mudblood" meant little from him, at least when applied to her. But she had been tired of explaining him, tired of coming up with excuses for him, fed up with the taunts in the common room about being the object of adoration of one of the creepiest Slytherins.
Like all the things that gnawed at Lily about the boy who was the only friend she had ever actively gotten rid of, the Death Eater boyfriend comments were disturbing because although she had spent five years denying or ignoring them, they contained a kernel of truth about herself to which she didn’t want to admit. She had rather fancied Sev when she was nine or ten, in so far as a child that age could; he had been brilliant and mysterious and intense and magical, both literally and metaphorically. She had been quite smitten. Hogwarts had changed all that.
At Hogwarts, suddenly she belonged to a world where everyone could do the things he had introduced her to, including herself. And at Hogwarts, she had discovered that there was a sharp divide between those who accepted Muggleborns and those who hated them -- and that Severus fell on the wrong side of that division. He and his friends would make some sneering remark about a Muggleborn student, and then he’d see Lily nearby and wipe the smile off his face and look guilty.
Unlike Petunia, who drew her social attitudes from her snobby friends, their parents had been self-consciously progressive enough never to care that Lily spent so much time with a boy who was probably what they would have referred to as poor. He came from the same neighborhood that produced the people Lily’s barmy, bigoted uncle used to rant about: the gangs of out-of-work young men who drank and fought, the good-for-nothings who lied to get on the dole, and “all those bloody immigrants.” Her parents were far more broad-minded than that, though, and Severus had always been more than welcome. Sev, on the other hand, hadn’t returned the favor; as soon as he had the chance to espouse a form of bigotry that gave him the upper hand, he had jumped at the opportunity.
It probably came from his mother, Lily knew, since he had entered Hogwarts already thinking those things. Mrs. Snape had a miserable, badly-paid job, a husband who was out of work half the time, and a run-down home in a declining neighborhood, but compared to a mere Muggleborn, she was a lady of quality. Why she had ever married a Muggle in the first place, Lily didn’t understand, but she had realised eventually that it was not unlikely that Mrs. Snape had developed her views about Muggles and Muggleborns as a result of the bitterness of her marriage. Severus’s parents never seemed particularly happy, and his dad wanted nothing to do with the whole wizarding world. Maybe that was how Severus’s mother had fought back: raising their boy to think that his own father was beneath him.
In their early days at Hogwarts, however, before they had settled into groups of friends that couldn’t stand each other, she and Sev had once had a friendship that had been somewhat unique. No other girl seemed to have a best friend who was a boy, which drew some teasing, but eventually people got used to it even as she and Severus slowly grew apart. As she got older and people started going out with each other, Lily never really felt the need for that sort of thing; she had never had a boyfriend because she always had … a boy.
Besides, she’d had an on-again, off-again fancy for him that she’d never told anyone about and that, she was certain, he had never suspected. Usually it was over the summer, and only occasionally during the school year, and it was always short-lived, because Severus inevitably did something to ruin it. That he did was a bit of a relief, because while Lily knew girls who were drawn to boys who needed to be saved from themselves, she really wasn’t that type. She had friends who were looking for dangerous, thrilling boys, but in that regard, Lily recognised herself to be as boring as Petunia: basically, she was looking for a potential husband, not a youthful mistake.
Sev fit the bill in some ways. His wit and brilliance were very attractive -- mandatory, really, since she couldn’t imagine herself going out with anyone who wasn’t at least as bright as she was. He was a voracious reader, also a non-negotiable point. Severus, however, was both brilliant and troubled, and he wallowed in it, and therein lay the problem. The funny, prickly, mercurial companion of her childhood became known around Hogwarts not only for being extraordinarily gifted, but also for being angry and hateful. Meanwhile, Lily was making friends who couldn’t understand why she had anything to do with him. If they had ever thought that she had fancied him, they would have laughed her out of the school -- or taken her to Madam Pomfrey for something to clear her head.
There was a list she had written, at about thirteen years of age, in a journal she mostly neglected: Things To Do With Sev. Most of them involved experiences that his parents either couldn’t have afforded, or couldn’t have bothered with, since they didn’t seem particularly interested in their son. They were mostly fairly ambitious: teach him how to ride a bicycle. Take him to see the ocean. Teach him how to swim. There were a few others: a particular favorite was a day trip to Diagon Alley minus the crumblies, once they were both old enough. She never wrote down “Kiss him,” because those occasions on which she wanted to were inevitably succeeded by occasions in which the very idea repelled her, and she knew she would just have wound up scribbling it out.
Only one had been checked off the list: she had convinced him to learn how to ride a bicycle, aided by the fact that her bike, while built for a girl, was a dark forest green and was thus not ridiculously feminine, especially not once she had removed the basket with the plastic flowers and the bell. Actually, the look on his face when he had seen the bike, still complete with the flowery basket and bell, had been rather priceless, just as she had known it would be, which was why she hadn’t just taken them off in advance. As with his efforts on a broom, the process was very awkward at first, but he had gotten surprisingly good rather quickly. Her dad had loaned them his bike for the excursions they had taken that summer, which went a long way toward assuaging Severus’s offended masculinity at having learned on a girl’s bicycle, and they had reveled in the new-found freedom of exploring the town on wheels. That particular “Thing To Do With Sev” had been a success.
He never liked to be indebted, so in return he had taught her the waltz, something his Muggle grandmother, who was thrilled that any grandchild of hers was going to boarding school, had insisted on teaching him before he went off to his mysterious school, “in case they had a cotillion.” Lily still had no idea what a cotillion was -- she suspected that Severus also had no idea what a cotillion was -- but she was happy to learn how to do the waltz. After the requisite clumsy toe-stepping efforts without music, when Lily had achieved a bit more fluency at it, Sev had flipped through her record collection and had found that, to no one’s surprise, she didn’t exactly have the best of 1800’s Vienna. Her parents’ records were mostly either Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or folk tunes of the Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary variety, and thus were equally useless.
Lily had put on one of the Beatles albums for background music while they chatted, and at some point Severus had noted that "You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away" had kind of a three-four time rhythm. So he had re-set the arm on the record player and showed her how to do the waltz to an actual song. It was fun, and clumsy, but then somewhere in the middle of the fourth or fifth repeat of the song, he had made the perfectly innocent comment, "This is surprisingly tolerable," meaning the music, but his voice had been softer than usual, almost husky, and somehow that reminded her of his guilty-sounding muttered excuses, the ones he gave every time she argued with him about something he and his friends had done.
That had made her realise that she was in the middle of her family’s living room standing very close to a boy whose views were so retrograde and disturbing that she might as well have been dancing with Jeffrey, the Evans's idiot neighbor in Petunia’s year who had gone fascist, shaved his head and joined the National Front. She was fourteen and too young for whatever it was she felt like doing -- slapping some sense into Sev, or kissing him -- so she had pulled away and said brightly, "Well, now I know how to do the waltz. How about some lunch? Chicken sandwich?" And then he had sat there, arms crossed, sullen and puzzled, while John Lennon finished the song and the next one came on and Lily made him a chicken sandwich, which he had eaten in silence as though he were starved.
He hadn’t been the only mercurial one in that friendship, which is why she made a point of never telling him on the occasions when she fancied him, because she knew that, within days or weeks or minutes, it would blow over and she’d wonder what she had been thinking. That was at least one thing that she had done right. Whether she had done the right thing in getting rid of him, however, was another question.
Her life had certainly been simpler since putting Severus behind her. No fights. Practically no interaction with the Voldemort Youth, which was a blessed relief, although she had to give him credit for secretly calling them the Voldemort Youth. No concerned questioning from her friends. No embarrassment about being friends with someone who -- pick one -- A) was planning to be a Death Eater, B) was alarmingly possessive of her and went on like a broken record about the only boy who obviously fancied her, or C) washed his hair about every four days when he really couldn’t get away with more than two.
She did miss his humour; every now and again something happened in class, and she wanted to whisper something to him or send a note to him to share a joke that only he would understand, but she couldn’t anymore. She missed his casual brilliance as a study partner, especially in Potions. Sometimes she even missed meaning that much to someone, because nobody had ever needed her like he had. That last one was easy to dismiss: it had been bad for him to rely so much on one person, and there was no way that she could have kept up her end of things. Better to break it off now than having to let him down for a boyfriend in future.
Besides, the War had picked up in intensity, and as she grew up and found out more about it, and as more and more of her friends who had graduated became involved in it, she felt that there was a role for her there, too. It was the great event of their time, justice versus injustice, good versus evil, and they needed all the help they could get. Her disagreement with Severus over this issue was just too fundamental; much and all as he hemmed and hawed over it when she pressed him about it, the fact remained that he wanted to commit himself the very cause that she wanted to spend her life defeating. There was no reconciliation between their views in this all-important matter.
No, she had made the right decision. She brought to a close the reverie that Sirius Black had inadvertently triggered, and -- her mind at ease, her conscience at peace for the present, anyway -- tried to figure out the Arithmancy homework. The mental gymnastics had been a good warm-up to it, oddly enough: Arithmancy was complicated, but not as complicated as the ins and outs of seven years with Severus Snape. She pulled out a quill and parchment, and set to work.
Snivellus and the Head Girl by SeverusSempra
Chapter Notes: And now for Lily's point of view. (About time.)
Chapter Endnotes: Thank you, Sandy (Snape's Talon) and Fresca (Colores), who are the world's greatest betas. Thanks in advance for reviews!-- although it now feels like I've been writing this forever, it's my first fic, so the input is really helpful.