Be Careful
106: Whose Love You Desire
By Anne B. Walsh
“Severus!”
Light, sound, sensation returned as abruptly as they had vanished. He stood at one end of a narrow, roofed area, open to the outdoors on three sides, one of which had train tracks running along it. A woman hurried towards him, her lips still parted from calling his name, the green eyes she had bequeathed to her son bright with joy.
Laying it on rather thick, I see. Severus deliberately turned his back, folding his arms across his chest. A place that means hope and new beginnings to me, and the one person I had most desired to see.
Even had I not been warned, some things are still too good to be true.
Behind him, an exasperated sigh. “I can’t say I wasn’t expecting you to be difficult, Sev, but this is a bit much. Don’t I even rate a hello after all this time?”
Perhaps if you truly were who you appear to be... “No,” Severus said aloud.
“Well, that’s put me in my place, hasn’t it?” The voice grew warm and rich with overtones of laughter, exactly the way he had always loved to hear it. “At least turn around and look at me if you won’t say hi. I can’t imagine I’m that repulsive to you.”
“No,” Severus repeated, allowing a bit of his rising anger to enter his tones. This is not only a despicably low trick but insulting to her memory. To use her face, her voice, her spirit of love and life, to persuade me nothing is wrong and encourage me to trust before destroying my hopes... if I could reach you at this moment, Voldemort, there would be one fewer Dark Lord in the world.
“Stubborn as ever, I see. All right, here’s how we’ll do things. If you’re not facing me within five seconds, I’m going to hang you up by an ankle and see if you’ve learned anything about wearing clean underwear since the last time we met.”
That does it. Severus whirled, glaring down at the semblance of Lily Evans. “How dare you,” he snarled into her face. “How dare you stand here, wearing her likeness, and make reference to that?”
“You know me, Sev. I’d dare almost anything if it got me what I wanted.” Lily held up a hand as Severus started to retort. “No, let me finish. You can shout at me after I’m done talking. I don’t have much to say. Agreed?”
Severus gave a curt nod. There is no need for me to believe anything this fantasy-puppet tells me, but it goes against my grain to be rude even to Lily’s image. I can return to ignoring her when she is through speaking.
“I know what you’re afraid of,” Lily said bluntly. “It isn’t true, and I can prove it—hear me out!” She snapped the last three words over the beginning of Severus’ heated denial. “Merlin’s striped pajamas, haven’t you picked up any manners in the last twenty years? As I was saying, you’re a Legilimens. You can see someone’s memories, catch her surface thoughts, sense how her mind works. So...” She lifted her head and looked him full in the face. “Try it on me.”
“Why?” Severus asked suspiciously, directing his gaze over her shoulder. “What good will it do?”
“You used to be smarter than this,” Lily teased. “Think, Sev! If I’m made up, either you or Voldemort has to have done the making—and that means all the making, thoughts and everything! Don’t you believe you could tell the difference between the way you think and the way I do? I’d certainly hope you could for Voldemort!”
Severus turned to look out over the train tracks, his mind racing. It sounds plausible enough. Certainly Voldemort could never hope to reproduce the tenor of Lily’s thoughts accurately. But what about me? If she is my creation and Voldemort is merely using her, can I trust myself to discern that?
“You never really understood me,” Lily said quietly, breaking into his thoughts. “Nor I you, not until years too late, but that’s beside the point now. What matters is the truth. You want it, I want you to have it, so come and get it.”
And there is my answer. I can fool myself only so long as I remain a willing part of the deal, and my willingness is at an end.
Black eyes sought and held green. Two minds touched, the one opening itself to the other.
It is time to face facts.
Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, memories flickered past, remnants of a life too soon ended. Some involved events Severus had known about, while others he never had, but each was imbued with a sense he experienced as a breath of sweet musk and a brush of soft fur.
I never knew how Lily felt to Legilimency—I did not learn it until after we had parted ways—but this suits her as perfectly as her eyes or hair.
More than that, every memory he viewed was overlaid and intertwined with peace, a peace that set the seal on the life Lily Evans had lived and marked it as finished without relegating it to unimportance.
And peace is something I have never known. My inventing it to bestow it upon a false Lily is as impossible as Argus Filch becoming Headmaster in my place.
His legs began to tremble as the meaning of this became clear to him.
She is not a fantasy.
She is real.
Neither delusion nor torture but the true Lily, the only girl I ever loved...
Small, strong hands closed on his shoulders, controlling his fall so that he ended up on his knees rather than on his face. “You must have known I’d come to you,” her voice whispered, as her arms wrapped around him and drew him close.
“I never dared hope for it,” Severus answered brokenly, feeling his tears soak into her robes. “How could I?”
“Surely you didn’t think I stopped caring about you because we had a fight?”
Startled, Severus pulled away enough to look up at her. “A fight? Is that all it was? After I called you—”
“Hardly the first time I’d heard the word,” Lily interrupted. “Not the last time either.”
“And after I hexed—”
“He deserved it.” Lily spoke in the flat tone of one who would allow no protest to her words, and Severus smiled in spite of himself. “Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. I always liked you better when you weren’t scowling. Here, take this.” She produced a handkerchief and held it out. “I won’t use it for you unless you make me.”
“Thank you for that.” Severus blotted his face and returned the small square of white. “Where are we?”
“You don’t recognize platform nine and three-quarters? I thought you were stabbed in the neck, not hit on the head.”
“I was, but I had no idea that King’s Cross Station was where one went after one had died.” Getting to his feet with Lily’s help, Severus glanced down the empty tracks. “Though I will admit that riding British Rail for eternity seems a fair definition of one popular destination.”
Lily snickered. “I’ll have to remember that next time I’m called for a consult. But as you’ve probably guessed, this isn’t what you’ve always considered the real platform nine and three-quarters. It is a real version of that place, and more real in its own way than the one where we boarded seven years’ worth of trains together.”
“‘Further up and further in,’” Severus quoted.
“Exactly.” Lily gave him an approving glance. “But in your case, there’s more of a choice to it than that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
A sigh. “Sev, we need to talk.”
Severus raised an eyebrow. “About?”
“You.” Glancing around, Lily located a bench and led Severus to it, sitting down beside him. “There are a few things I don’t think you’ve admitted to yourself yet, and you need to. It’s why you’re here.”
The other eyebrow joined its friend. “I thought I was here because I was dead.”
“Yes, well...” Lily’s lips twitched. “Let’s save that for a bit later. In the first place, Sev, you’re an incurable romantic. You always have been. I know you don’t want to believe that,” she went on, squeezing his hand to still his protest, “but it’s true. No one but an incurable romantic would believe that he’s loved the same unobtainable woman all his life.”
“I have loved you all my life!”
She snatched her hand out of his and slapped him on the back of the head.
Severus yelped before he could stop himself. “What was that for?” he demanded.
“For having either a rotten definition of love or a very poor idea of me!”
“I don’t understand.” Severus rubbed the sore spot on his head and wished he hadn’t sounded so much like a sulky child.
“Love,” Lily said through clenched teeth, “is about caring for someone else before you care about yourself. About doing what they would want, not what you want. Has it ever occurred to you, through all these years you’ve been punishing yourself for getting me killed, to think about what I would have told you to do if I’d had the chance?”
The word “Yes” died unsaid on Severus’ tongue as he remembered a conversation in a rose garden about this very topic.
And it was only the latest of many.
What have I done?
“You’ve wasted your life.” Lily shook her head, turning to stare into the distance beyond the train tracks. “Hiding in that dungeon, never letting yourself do anything pleasant because you thought you didn’t deserve it... I wanted you to live for me, Sev. Not die for me. Not literally, and not figuratively either.”
Severus bowed his head, shame turning his face an unaccustomed red. Cecy was right. I’ve been a fool.
“However.” The mischievous smile was dancing on Lily’s lips once more as he looked up. “There is one thing you’ve done of which I wholeheartedly approve. And yes, before you ask, I can read your mind, just a little. Nothing below the surface, though. Now, follow me.” She stood up and led the way down the platform, taking Severus’ hand in hers again. “And don’t be frightened.”
Severus was about to scoff at the notion that he could be frightened by anything now, when between one step and another their surroundings vanished. They floated hand in hand above—
“What do you see?” Lily asked softly.
“I see...” Severus looked from place to place in awe. “I see the world.”
“Yes, you do.” Lily made a motion with her free hand. “And now?”
The panorama before Severus’ eyes blurred, then settled into a new configuration. “Worlds,” he breathed, stretching out a hand as though to touch them. “Hundreds of them. Thousands.”
“Possibly even millions. I’ve never counted.” Lily gestured again, and the worlds seemed to thin, though they lost none of their richness and complexity. “Now?”
“They all touch. Like the pages of a book, the book of the universe.” Severus was vaguely aware that he was talking in bad poetry, but he thought he might be excused based on the situation. “Is this what the afterlife is? Watching worlds?”
“In a way. But that’s not important now. What is important is that all these worlds are real. They aren’t all real in the same place, obviously, but they are all real. Do you understand?”
Severus nodded. “I think so.”
“Good. Then we can get to the point of all this.” A third wave of Lily’s hand created a broad, rose-colored ribbon above the “book” of worlds, which slipped between the pages like a two-ended bookmark. “Once upon a time there was a wise man who wanted to help a friend, but he knew the friend would reject any usual sort of help. So he went looking for an unusual sort of help, and he found it in another world, far away.”
“He connected the worlds somehow?” Severus hazarded.
“He did, though not physically. That takes an incredible amount of magic to pull off. No, he created a connection that required only a mind and a soul to pass over it, and so his friend was helped by someone from a far-distant world. So distant, in fact, that she had no direct counterpart in the friend’s own world, and thus the friend was under the impression that she did not really exist.” Lily chuckled under her breath. “He always was a hard one to get an idea through to.”
Severus turned to look straight at Lily, noticing with the rim of his eye that they had returned to platform nine and three-quarters. “Tell me this is only a story,” he said, unsure even in his own mind whether the words were a command or a plea.
“Oh, Severus.” Lily laid her free hand on his shoulder. “Don’t you want her to be real?”
Y— “No!” Severus snapped, overriding his own mind’s treachery. “I love you!”
Lily shook her head. “No,” she said in her turn. “You don’t. Not the way you always thought you did.”
This is not how this meeting was supposed to go. “That’s impossible! I have never stopped loving you—”
“But it was never the kind of love you wanted it to be,” Lily broke in. “You were young, you didn’t have anyone else to love, I can see why you got confused. But we never would have worked out, Sev, not like that. We made wonderful friends, but we weren’t intended for lovers. And you and Cecilia are.”
“I—she—” A new line of argument occurred to Severus. “If I have never loved you, how do you explain this?” he asked, freeing his hand in order to draw his wand. “Expecto patronum!” The silver doe leapt free and galloped down the platform, pausing for an instant to look back at them before she vanished.
“Because that’s not who I am.” Lily sighed. “You never could get over seeing me through James, could you? Especially not after we died together. You didn’t blame him for my death, you knew who to blame for that, but you blamed him for being the one who got to go with me, while you were left behind.”
“Yes,” Severus admitted. “I did.”
“So that’s where your Patronus came from at first. My doe to James’ stag. But if you’d kept me, the real me, in your heart all these years, I think it would have looked a bit more like...” Lily blew into the air between them. “This.”
Severus stared, fascinated, at a man who bore his face and his lineaments but was not him, walking beside a shimmering ward with a great silver tigress pacing beside him. Strength, tenacity, and fierceness, especially when defending her offspring... it fits better than I want to acknowledge. But truthfulness is the order of the day here.
“That may well be,” he said, looking up. “But then who...”
Lily snapped her fingers, and the scene changed. A doe with pale brown fur ran swiftly through a wood, her hooves throwing up small puffs of dust wherever they landed. She leaped a brook, stopped, reared, and changed into—
“What point is there in telling me this now?” Severus asked, unable to take his eyes away from the slender blonde woman where she leaned against a tree, laughing. “What good can it do?”
Now that I am dead?
“Well, that requires a bit more backtracking.” Lily flicked her hand at the picture, which vanished. “You must have noticed how oddly Draco Malfoy was acting back there.”
“Oddly.” Severus snorted. “That is one way to put it. Without rhyme or reason would be another.”
“No, just without any reason you could have understood until now. He was trying to save you, Severus.”
“Save me? Lily, he had me killed!”
“Yes, he did.” Lily nodded matter-of-factly. “But that was going to happen anyway, as soon as Voldemort got it into his head that you were the reason the Elder Wand wouldn’t work the way he wanted it to. You’re not, you never were, but that didn’t stop Draco from using that idea for his own ends.” For an instant, her face was bleak. “Sev, I swear, if I’d known you’d experience what happened, I’d have come sooner than I did, but I never thought you would still be aware...”
“What happened?” Severus asked blankly. “Do you mean—”
“When you felt as though you were being trapped. You were. Your soul, at least, and your mind, and they’re what count, wouldn’t you say?”
Severus was not attending to this. “So he was the one.”
“Let me finish before you start plotting terrible fates for him.” Lily shoved his shoulder affectionately. “First answer my question. Do you agree with me that the mind and soul are the parts of a person that matter? That the body is ultimately a secondary concern?”
“Can I do otherwise, with the evidence all around me?”
Lily smirked. “Good. Now, can you say, ‘I don’t want to go on the cart’?”
Nonplussed, Severus frowned. “I could, but why?”
“Because it’s entirely appropriate.” Lily pressed his hand. “Severus, you’re not dead.”
Author Notes:
I finished this on Thursday but thought it would be more appropriate here. My apologies for the extra wait for the chapter and the cliffie resolution, though if you’ve been reading carefully it shouldn’t have been that bad a cliffie. I’ve got a much worse one coming up. Mwahaha.