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1.
Severus Snape is dead. He’s pretty fucking sure about that. He very clearly recalls Nagini’s fangs sinking into his neck, and then bleeding out on the floor of the Shrieking Shack as he snatches one last reminder of Lily from the eyes of her son.
Except now he’s sitting at the breakfast table of his childhood home, in front of a chipped plate bearing a piece of buttered toast, and his mum is casting scourgify on a sink full of washing-up behind him.
The morning sun has cast a bright beam of sunlight onto the gingham tablecloth, illuminating small motes of dust in the air. Opposite him, old family photographs and framed watercolours break up the nicotine-stained wallpaper at wide intervals, and he can hear his father moving about the house through the half-open kitchen door.
Everything is exactly as he remembers.
Carefully, Severus puts down the butter knife in his hand, and takes a slow, deep breath, and tries to work out what the absolute fuck is going on.
Option one: He’s still dying; he’s just delirious from blood loss, in which case there’s nothing he can do about it.
Option two: He’s dead and this is the afterlife. In which case he’s probably being punished for something, because Severus’ childhood was not fun , and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Option three: His entire life has been some kind of bizarre, time-dilated hallucination, in which case all bets are off and he’ll just need to tackle life as it comes (and also convince his mother to take him to St Mungo’s as soon as possible).
Option four: He’s been somehow reborn into his childhood body at the age of eight or so, with a full complement of knowledge from his former life, in which case he now has a chance to make things right.
None of the other options give him much to work with, so Severus decides to go along with number four and adapt as necessary.
He’ll need to do a lot of thinking if he’s going to pull this off.
His first glimpse of Lily makes him feel like he’s actually eight years old; weightlessly, innocently happy, as only the very young can be. And for a few years, he really does try to be a child again, but some of his and Lily’s games feel asinine and boring now, and the weight of his father’s drinking and his mother’s emotional distance lends the world a bitter shadow.
“You’re so serious , Sev,” Lily tells him, more than once. It doesn’t stop her from spending time with him, though, and if anything, her attention becomes even more persistent and kind than it was in his first life. In return, he cherishes her attention with infinite care, like trying to keep a soap bubble intact in your hands.
At his muggle Primary school, he quickly makes the mistake of doing too well. His teacher pays a visit to his home and talks excitedly about scholarships and special academies and grammar schools. Afterwards, his father accuses him of cheating and beats him until his mother intervenes. From then on, Severus is careful to keep his work at an age-appropriate level, and avoids the teacher’s suspicious gaze.
He attempts, once, to convince his parents to invest in Macintosh computers. It goes about as smoothly as his brief display of childhood genius. When Lily notices the bruises, he lies and tells her that he fell out of a tree.
Time seems to move more quickly now, which is interesting. Severus remembers the years between eight and eleven feeling like an eternity. Now, it feels like no time at all before he is sitting in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, with Lily by his side.
He begs the Sorting Hat to put him in Gryffindor, and after a bit of confused pondering, it tells him he has ‘an old soul’ and relents. The smile Lily gives Snape as he returns to his seat makes his last three years of childhood misery—and the impending four years of hellish puberty—all seem worthwhile.
Disturbingly, he realizes afterwards that Peter Pettigrew has now been sorted into Slytherin. It makes Severus wonder how many people have been shunted into the wrong house purely to make up the numbers, and then—because Peter was sorted before him—whether the Sorting Hat perceives time differently or whether there’s some kind of complex predestination mechanic involved.
Thinking about it gives Severus a headache. He puts the matter aside and decides to concentrate on his research. Unfortunately, there’s not much in the library about temporal magic, and his efforts to convince Madam Pince to give him access to the Restricted Section are futile. He briefly considers going to Dumbledore and explaining the whole situation, but he doesn’t trust that big beardy arsehole as far as he can throw him. Instead, he keeps his head down, and starts being extra helpful in the library, hoping that Irma Pince will soften up after a year or two.
He spends a lot of time thinking about how to handle Voldemort. Taking him on personally would be suicide, obviously, and Snape is more concerned with protecting Lily than defeating the Dark Lord directly, but he reasons that it couldn’t hurt to destabilize the man’s position a bit. He briefly considers pretending to be a Seer, but concludes it would draw too much attention, and instead begins sending anonymous owls to Alastor Moody, providing the names of those Death Eaters whom he knows have already infiltrated the Ministry.
It turns out to be very effective. Effective enough that Ministry officials start turning up at Hogwarts within six months, asking pointed questions. Severus affects innocence, and he’s fairly confident that he’s getting away with it right until the point that a terrified-looking Lucius Malfoy ambushes him in the library late one evening.
He deflects the curse just in time, but Lucius is older and quicker, and Severus is so focused on defending himself that when someone else grabs him from behind and twists the wand from his fingers, he can’t even attempt a wandless cast.
They must, he thinks, have been charged to capture him, but the panic in Lucius’ face tells Severus that they don’t know what they’re doing, and when his unseen assailant tackles him to the ground, he feels the bright hot crack of his head hitting the table, and then—
2.
Severus Snape is eight years old. Again.
He picks up his toast, and rethinks his strategy.
It’s a little easier to enjoy his time with Lily now. Three years relatively free of adult responsibilities has given him back a little of that childhood wonder, and he runs and laughs and climbs trees with her and even starts being nice to her sister, which won’t hurt in the long term.
At Hogwarts, he devotes his library hours to researching defensive spells. Quite often, Lily joins him. She seems to spend more time with Severus than ever before, perhaps because of his efforts with Petunia, and he takes the opportunity to start tutoring her on the side. She is an extremely quick study, and love swells in Severus’ chest at this reminder of her intelligence. She’d always been too good for Potter.
At seventeen years old, he kisses her for the first time. They spend six wonderful months as a couple, holding hands under the table during lessons and visiting Hogsmeade together at the weekends.
And then she leaves him for James.
Severus does not react well.
He almost tells her the whole truth, then, but has just enough presence of mind to restrain himself to begging and crying. It does not help. For a week, he wanders around in a depressive haze, and then he snaps and tries to Imperio James Potter into kissing another girl in front of Lily.
Unfortunately, he is caught in the act, and sentenced to life in Azkaban. Fortunately, he is nothing if not resourceful, and nobody thinks to take his shoelaces before the trial. By the time the Aurors arrive to transport him from his Ministry cell, Severus Snape is already dead.
3.
He does his best with Lily, but the wounds of his last life are still fresh in his mind. Perhaps for that reason, she keeps him at arm’s length, although they are still sorted into Gryffindor together and their joint study sessions in the library continue apace.
One day, she puts her hand on his arm, and says, fondly, “I just feel so comfortable around you, Severus. You’re like a brother to me.”
Perhaps as a result, Snape decides to take a more proactive approach to undermining Lily and James’ relationship. He engenders a subtle rumour that Potter was seen kissing Greta Catchlove at the top of the Astronomy Tower. When that doesn’t work, he changes it to Remus Lupin, at the Shrieking Shack. It’s similarly ineffective, although Snape later notices Remus and Sirius holding hands under a desk at the library.
When he spikes James’ soap with undiluted bubotuber pus, Lily lovingly prepares a cauldron of Cure for Boils during Potions club. When he slips Fungiface Potion into James’ morning cornflakes, Lily stays by his side in the medical wing until all the fungus has fallen off again. When he targets James with a subtle Urinary Incontinence spell in the middle of a duelling lesson, Lily is the only person who doesn’t laugh, and lends him her cloak to cover the wet patch over his trousers while she escorts him to the medical wing yet again.
Finally, he leaks to the Ministry that James is an unregistered Animagus. It succeeds only in getting the young man expelled, and not—as Severus was hoping—sentenced to a stint in Azkaban. Lily still marries him when she leaves Hogwarts, and her behaviour towards Snape becomes markedly colder after the incident, though he’d done his best to cover his tracks.
He starts planning to lie in wait outside their marital home on the night of Voldemort’s attack, hoping to take the Dark Lord unawares, but Lily surprises him by moving overseas with James shortly after Harry is born, and despite all his efforts, Severus is unable to get hold of her new address.
He sets out searching for her, and doesn’t stop until a year later, when a copy of the Daily Prophet arrives at his temporary lodgings with news of a fatal Death Eater attack on two British wizards living in Ulaanbaatar. Rumour has it that their infant son has survived.
Rumour has it that the Dark Lord has not.
And somewhere within the dark haze of his grief, Severus Snape has a realization.
He has previously been working under the assumption that if he doesn’t leak the prophecy to Voldemort—if he avoids the Death Eaters altogether—nothing will happen to Lily. He now knows this to be wrong. And he has no idea why .
The most likely culprit is Peter Pettigrew. For the last three lives, Snape has seen him sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor; it’s not impossible that he’s now taken on a similar role to the one Severus assumed in his first life. Except that if Pettigrew never joined the Order and became their secret-keeper, somebody else would have had to leak the Potters’ whereabouts to the Dark Lord.
So far, Snape has avoided joining both the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix, but he’s beginning to realize that he might need to embed himself in at least one of them in order to protect Lily. It is not an attractive prospect. Thankfully, he probably won’t need to worry about that until his next life—and he thinks he can safely assume there will be a next life, because nothing is ever easy for Severus Snape and clearly the universe is punishing him.
He scours the country for Pettigrew while the post-war celebrations rage on around him, finds his grave, breaks into the Weasley house while they’re all out partying, finds nothing, realizes that Pettigrew could be literally anywhere, goes home, and gets extremely drunk.
Two days later, once the hangover has worn off, he applies for a teaching position at Hogwarts.
He takes over from Slughorn’s temporary successor in January 1982, and throws himself into his work. After three lifetimes’ worth of study, the art of potion-making has become second nature to him. The art of dealing with children hasn’t, however, and he is quickly back in the running for the position of ‘most feared/reviled Hogwarts professor’.
It occurs to Severus Snape that he’s never actually liked children. What kind of masochist applies to work at a school if they don’t like children? The kind who’s been guilt-tripped into watching over the orphaned offspring of their unrequited love, that’s who. But this time his decision has nothing to do with Dumbledore twisting his arm and everything to do with being in the right place to find out exactly what in Merlin’s name is going on.
First stop: Dumbledore himself. He introduces the subject of Horcruxes late one night in the Headmaster’s office, and watches the older wizard’s expression darken.
“An interesting choice of topics, Severus,” he replies. “May I ask what brought this on?”
Snape decides to go with a half-truth. “I have concerns about the Dark Lord, Headmaster. I fear he isn’t as dead as everyone seems to think.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that he’s an extremely powerful megalomaniac with no sense of proportion. Tell me—why would a man like that stop at dominion over muggles? Why not aim for immortality while he’s at it?”
Dumbledore meets his gaze searchingly. “It certainly fits his modus operandi . You know, I assume, how a Horcrux is created? But it would also leave him vulnerable in a different way. He would need to have selected a hiding place with extreme care. I doubt there was anyone in Voldemort’s life he trusted enough to endow them with such a precious artefact.”
“Perhaps not. Unless he managed to create more than one.”
The older wizard raises both eyebrows.
“You have an uncommonly dark imagination, Severus. Should I be concerned?”
“I’m not the one you need to worry about,” Snape replies. “Humour me, Albus. If you were Tom Riddle, where would you hide your soul?”
In point of fact, Snape already knows where a few of them are, but he needs to feign ignorance to get Dumbledore on side. As soon as he has the opportunity, he travels to Little Hangleton and finds Marvolo Gaunt’s ring exactly where Albus had described it to him in his first life, all those years ago.
He puts it very carefully in a box, returns to Hogwarts, and sets it down on Dumbledore’s desk with a decisive thunk.
“Under no circumstances must you attempt to put this on, Headmaster,” he says firmly, keeping his hand on the box’s lid. Dumbledore shoots him an amused frown.
“Why do you think I would attempt to wear a horcrux, Severus?”
“Because,” Snape tells him, flicking the box open, “It’s also the Resurrection Stone.”
Dumbledore gives him a long, inscrutable look.
“Now. As I understand it, the next step is destruction,” continues Severus. “Any ideas? And don’t say ‘basilisk venom’. I am not going down into the Chamber of fucking Secrets.”
In the end, they trudge out into the grounds on Christmas day, and spend the morning applying as many protective enchantments as they can before unleashing a small amount of Fiendfyre on the ring, and it still leaves an ugly burnt patch in the grass roughly the size of a muggle car. Hagrid is both upset and confused when he discovers the damage. Snape shifts the blame onto a student he doesn’t like.
The trouble comes when Snape moves on to the next Horcrux. Not trusting Dumbledore to retrieve it himself—and not having the patience to spend hours on the coast pretending to search for the right cave—he makes the journey alone.
It goes extremely badly. Severus had not been expecting inferi. Neither had he been expecting cursed water, or to have to drink cursed water, or to be driven insensible by said cursed water and promptly walk into the corpse-infested depths to end the pain.
4.
He spends a few moments at the beginning of his next life mouthing what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck until his father comes in and slaps him around the head for swearing.
At least he can relax and spend a few years enjoying his childhood with Lily.
It’s odd, the things you start to notice when you’ve lived before. Sometimes he catches a thoughtful distance in her eyes, and wonders if there are depths in her soul he does not yet know. Perhaps one day he will, once James has been dealt with.
The day of Sorting comes once more, and, once more, he is assigned to Gryffindor, and Peter Pettigrew to Slytherin. This time, though, Snape makes an effort to get close to James as well.
He calls on what little charm he has to ingratiate himself with as many people as possible, the Marauders included, and soon enough he’s transfiguring himself into a bat every month and joining Remus Lupin in the Shrieking Shack. He has to grit his teeth when James starts calling him Snouty, but his efforts win out in the end; Snape sets him up with every girl who so much as looks sideways at Potter, and some of the relationships even last more than a week.
The plan, as always, is to make sure Lily is safe before worrying about Voldemort’s return. But it never hurts to have a backup plan, and Severus would quite like to make it past thirty-eight this time, so he starts working on the Horcruxes as a side project. As soon as he’s old enough, he travels to Little Hangleton over the Christmas holidays and brings back Gaunt’s ring.
Turns out it’s not hard to convince three teenage boys to come out in the dead of night and destroy a random box using Fiendfyre. All you have to say is “Hey, let’s go out in the dead of night and cast Fiendfyre at this random box”, and boom, one Horcrux down, although that particular patch of ground will probably never look the same again.
He joins the Order as soon as he leaves Hogwarts, and spends the next couple of years fighting the Dark Lord alongside his new friends—though he’s careful never to come into direct contact with Voldemort—and he becomes so involved in the task that when Lily and James start dating, he almost doesn’t even notice. In the Dark Lord’s ranks, Snape was respected; now, he is both respected and, unbelievably, liked .
It feels wrong to start trying to break them up now, so Snape takes a different tack: he’ll save Lily, throw James under the proverbial bus if the opportunity presents itself, and, eventually, become little Harry Potter’s stepdad. That feels wrong too, but at least this way he can defer the decision until later and make it a problem for Future Snape to deal with.
When Lily becomes pregnant and decides to go into hiding, Severus volunteers to act as secret-keeper, but to his surprise, both Lily and Dumbledore veto this.
“You’re too valuable, dear boy,” Albus tells him. “To the best of my knowledge, nobody can bewitch or torture their way past a Fidelius charm, but I wouldn’t put it past Voldemort to at least try . And you seem to have a knack for rooting out his followers. I’m half-convinced you’re a better legilimens than the Dark Lord himself.”
Lily offers no explanation, but on reflection, Severus wonders if it’s something to do with all those girls he tried to set James up with. That, or someone has told her about the now-infamous ‘Fiendfyre incident’.
Still, he’s not going to be deterred. He’s fairly sure that the Potters’ emigration to Mongolia in his previous life was motivated in part by the series of humiliations James suffered at Hogwarts—and, of course, his subsequent expulsion. Without those factors, they should revert to their usual decision of moving to Godric’s Hollow, and so Severus dutifully travels to their home in the early afternoon of the 31st of October, 1981, armed with three tickets to Buenos Aires and a (hopefully) convincing cover story.
The house is empty.
Shit.
He waits all night, just in case, but nobody turns up, and when news of Lily’s death in a small cottage on the Isle of Wight reaches the Order the next morning, he spends the customary two days getting really drunk and crying and then returns to Hogwarts to continue with Project Horcrux.
So: Off to the cave with Albus Dumbledore. Keep an eye on him while he drinks the cursed water (and then ‘while Snape pours the last of the cursed water into his mouth’, which feels extremely grim and more than a bit cruel). Blast fire at the Inferi while the two of them escape. Retrieve Horcrux—
Correction: Retrieve fake Horcrux. Fuck. Fuck .
On the upside, the note inside strongly implies that whoever stole the Horcrux also intended to destroy it, so Snape puts that aside and concentrates on trying to tease out Dumbledore’s theories of where the others are—and, while he’s at it, who the secret-keeper was for Lily’s location, because damned if he could work out how Voldemort found it out without Peter Pettigrew in the picture.
It is not until a stray Revelio hits auror Alastor Moody, revealing him to be Bellatrix Lestrange in a polyjuice disguise, that Snape starts to genuinely believe the universe is conspiring against him.
Fortunately, the seizure of Bellatrix’s personal assets by the Ministry, and the subsequent return of Helga Hufflepuff’s cup to Hogwarts (and its “accidental” destruction by Fiendfyre shortly afterwards) provides Snape with a new and valuable clue. It takes him two years, but he finally locates Ravenclaw’s Diadem in the Room of Requirement, and—after establishing that Godric Gryffindor’s sword is not, in fact, a Horcrux—he turns his attention to the last two known Horcruxes: the locket, and the diary.
Unfortunately, Snape gets cocky.
It’s his own fault. He should have gone for the locket first; he should have confiscated the diary from the Weasley girl when she finally brought it to Hogwarts. But he didn’t want to wait that long. Albus had hinted to him, in his first life, that Harry suspected Lucius Malfoy of slipping the diary into Ginny’s cauldron, so it was off to Malfoy Manor to execute a careful break-in.
It’s no trouble to get past the protective enchantments, and the problem of stealth is easily solved; Severus simply transforms himself into a bat again. Unfortunately, he runs afoul of Lucius’ wife during what looks to be a secret midnight drinking session. Apparently, Narcissa Malfoy is the kind of woman who casually employs the Killing Curse against household pets, and even when drunk, her aim is exemplary .
5.
Okay. New plan: go full Dark. Join Voldemort’s ranks, work out how to bring him down without getting close enough to become a target for legilimency, be hailed as a redeemed hero, seduce Lily away from James, apply to Hogwarts, locate and destroy Horcruxes, live happily ever after as Harry Potter’s new stepdad.
It’s a great plan, but it stumbles at the first hurdle when Severus is sorted into Slytherin. Despite his attempts to stay close to Lily, she starts to look upon him with suspicion and distrust—is that new, or did he just fail to notice it in his first life?—and schmoozing with Voldemort’s sympathizers ends up taking priority.
Returning to Slytherin has additional consequences. As in his first life, Severus becomes fair game for Potter and his gang of bullies. It stings to have his former friends jeering at him behind his back, and Severus gains a little more sympathy for his past self. Who wouldn’t be swayed by the power and glamour of the Dark Arts, if they’d spent their whole life feeling powerless and unloved?
He takes care, in this life, not to appear too competent. Sure, his occlumency was good enough in his first life to hide his treachery from Voldemort, but he can’t risk the Dark Lord finding out about the whole reincarnation-loop affair. Worst-case-scenario, Voldemort finds a way to loop alongside him, and Severus is rewarded with an eternity of being horribly murdered over and over again.
Instead, he maintains a careful position on the periphery while at the same time feeding anonymous information to the Order about Voldemort’s operations, and he’s just starting to congratulate himself for successfully weakening the Death Eater cause when he is promptly snatched from Spinner’s End in the dead of night and thrown at the Dark Lord’s feet.
The thing about torture is that everyone breaks in the end. Snape is under no illusions; he’s seen first-hand what the Death Eaters are willing to do to someone, and his occlumency can’t hold out forever. It takes them roughly twelve hours to get him to the point where he’s considering surrender.
Fortunately, neither Voldemort nor his followers seem to know what a cyanide capsule is, and by the time he’s broken the false tooth and swallowed it down, it is too late for anyone to save him.
6.
On the downside, he spends a lot of his childhood crying inexplicably and having night terrors, and he’s starting to wonder if it’s physically possible to have PTSD from your experiences in a past life.
On the upside, he’s now confident enough in his occlumency—and in the efficacy of cyanide—that he can afford to get a little closer to the Dark Lord this time. So. New plan. Go full Dark. Join Voldemort’s ranks, accompany to Godric’s Hollow, stay close until he’s dispatched James, stick the proverbial knife in his back, become redeemed hero, blah blah Hogwarts, blah blah Horcruxes, blah blah live happily ever after as Harry Potter’s new stepdad.
Simple.
He’d assumed that, after twelve solid hours of being the Death Eaters’ source of entertainment, having James Potter and his fellow delinquents call him snivellus would be water off a duck’s back. Instead, it feels like adding insult to injury, and it’s extremely difficult for Snape not to retaliate.
He’s getting tired. Tired enough that he’s seriously considering going to Dumbledore and spilling the whole story. Even if Albus believes him, though, Snape can’t guarantee that he won’t then try and engineer a way to stop the loop—and Severus is not ready for that—or, even worse, to start looping alongside him in an effort to prevent Voldemort’s rise to power.
Or—no. Maybe he’d actively try to prevent Severus from altering the original timeline. Perhaps by wiping his memory. Albus is exactly the kind of arsehole who’d do that.
Whatever the case, the fact remains that Snape cannot trust him. His situation is getting lonely, but not that lonely. Severus spent almost an entire lifetime without any real friends; he will happily endure another few centuries of isolation if it means saving Lily.
This time, he’s cautious. He doesn’t touch the Horcrux issue. He sneaks dutifully into the Hog’s Head pub in the early months of 1980, makes sure nobody else is there to overhear the prophecy, gets promptly chucked out for eavesdropping, and doesn’t tell Voldemort any of it. He bides his time until he knows Lily and James are going into hiding, captures Peter Pettigrew, and throws him in a secure cellar with enough food and water to last until October. Then he sits back and waits.
And then, at a gathering of Voldemort and his closest followers in the opulent drawing-room of Malfoy Manor, the Dark Lord announces, “We have a friend in the Department of Mysteries. A prophecy has been made…”
Fucking fantastic.
“Something wrong, Severus?” Voldemort’s eyes bore into his. Snape lets his mind go carefully blank.
“Apologies, my lord,” he says. “It is nothing. Only… this cognac is absolutely terrible. It tastes like it’s been watered down with cheap vodka." (Narcissa shifts guiltily in her seat.) "Please, continue.”
It comes as little surprise when Harry Potter’s location is leaked to the Death Eaters a few months later. (Snape doesn’t even bother to try and work out who did it.) Even worse—despite spending the last few years flattering the absolute bollocks out of Voldemort and demonstrating his competence at every turn, Severus is not permitted to accompany the Dark Lord on his mission to bravely murder a one-year-old child, so he takes matters into his own hands.
He travels to Godric’s Hollow on the evening of the 31st of October, casts an Invisibility charm on himself, sneaks into the Potters’ house with a view to getting the jump on Voldemort when he turns up… and promptly takes an Avada Kedavra to the face.
It’s so quick that he doesn’t even see who casts it, but he’s fairly sure the voice was Lily’s.
7.
When he goes to find Lily on that sunny spring morning in 1968, she is nowhere to be seen.
A weather-beaten poster at the bus stop near his home declares that Lily Evans (seven years old, red hair, green eyes, 4ft 1in) has been missing for three weeks, and that if anyone has any information on her whereabouts, to please call the number below.
Severus does not speak for three days.
He’s so distracted at his muggle Primary school that a teacher comes home to have a concerned talk with his parents. There is nobody to ask him about the inevitable bruises that result. There is nobody to take his mind off the grim reality of his childhood, no bright spark amidst the pain.
It’s a good few months before he can bring himself to try and work out what’s happened.
Someone else is looping alongside him; that much is clear. He wonders momentarily if it might have been Voldemort, but concludes that the situation would be a lot worse by now if that were the case.
He can think of only two other possibilities, but he has no way to test either of them until Hogwarts, so he bides his time, again, and when the Sorting Hat is finally plopped onto his desultory head, it puts him in Hufflepuff, because apparently he ‘could do with some cheering up’.
As soon as he has the opportunity, he visits Dumbledore in his office, and, in what he hopes is a suitably childlike manner, expresses an interest in temporal magic.
The Headmaster’s expression shifts from surprised to interested to thoughtful, at which point he leans back in his chair, and says, “A fascinating subject indeed. May I ask, Severus… is there something in particular which has sparked your curiosity?”
Snape shrugs.
“I’ve heard rumours about the kind of experiments they do in the Department of Mysteries. It just sounds really… exciting, is all,” he lies. “But I can’t work out how someone might force events to conform to the Novikov self-consistency principle without expending a huge amount of magical energy.”
Dumbledore narrows his eyes. There’s a slight sparkle in them that Snape can’t identify.
“Interesting,” he replies slowly. “I am not familiar with the Novikov self-consistency principle, although I have corresponded with one Dr Igor Novikov. His work in physics seems to be heading along similar lines, although, curiously , he has not yet published anything to that effect. Certainly nothing that would be accessible to even an extremely precocious eleven-year-old.”
Severus presses his lips together tightly, and thinks, shit .
His first instinct is to go for his wand, but Albus wrong-foots him by pushing a bowl of bright yellow sweets in his direction.
“Sherbert lemon?” he offers, then adds, with a shrewd look, “One is never too old to enjoy such things.”
Snape shakes his head mutely. Dumbledore carries on.
“You’re not in trouble, Severus,” he says. “I would certainly feel better if you could provide me with some answers, but I can see you don’t trust me, and I presume you have a very good reason for that.
“It might help you to know that you are not the first child to approach me about this subject. I shall tell you exactly what I told her. A temporal alteration spell of such magnitude that it allows a wizard to, for example , experience their life over and over again would need to meet three requirements.”
He counts out on his fingers as he speaks. “One: An extremely powerful caster, with access to a level of magical knowledge that I do not believe we will reach within this century.
“Two, the spell would need to arrange events in such a way as to preserve the life of the original caster.
“Three, given the level of complexity required to maintain this arrangement—not to mention, reach the intended outcome—it is extremely unlikely that this is the conscious work of one individual. Possibly it is a collaborative effort. More probably, it is an unconscious phenomenon, created through some magical accident by some individual hitherto unknown to us.”
Severus, oddly, feels like crying. He’s just so tired , and there seems to be no end to it all. Perhaps Dumbledore sees it in his eyes, because when he carries on, his voice is more gentle.
“I would hazard that once the spell has achieved its desired purpose, the loop will cease, and time will continue as normal.”
“But if it’s unconscious, how do we know what the purpose actually is?” Snape manages, his voice croaky.
“My guess? The resolution of some traumatic event in the caster's history—or a way to prevent it entirely. But I don’t have all the answers, Severus. I wish I did. I see that you have suffered a great deal, and I am sorry.”
Severus rubs his eye with the heel of his palm. For the first time in over a century, he feels like a child.
“It might help,” says Dumbledore carefully, “to speak with Lily about this.”
Snape’s head shoots up.
“Lily’s here?”
“She arrived a little late. Apparently the weather around the Hebrides is not suited to flying at the moment. I’ll send a house-elf to fetch her. I trust you know where to find the Room of Requirement?”
It is exactly what they need; a small, comfortingly-lit room full of soft beanbag chairs, snacks, and boxes of tissues, where the two of them can speak without being overheard.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” is the first thing Severus asks.
“Why didn’t you tell me ?” Lily counters.
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Exactly.” Her face softens. Despite her youth, Severus can see, now, how the years weigh heavy on her too. “I had my suspicions. But I didn’t know for sure until you turned up at the house.” She winces. “Sorry.”
“Don't be. It wasn't the first time I've been hit by the killing curse.”
“In my defence, I thought you were Voldemort.”
"It's an improvement on the last time. Narcissa Malfoy just thought I was a bat."
She smiles at him, and the whole world lights up one more time. Suddenly, Severus can't help but ask the question.
"Where did you go? I thought something terrible had happened to you."
Lily's gaze drops. "I needed time to think," she says. "Sev—all that time, did you…?"
"Yes." His voice is almost a whisper. No point hiding it now. "It's always been you, Lily."
Her eyes fill with tears. "I'm sorry I can't love you in the way you deserve."
It should hurt, but it doesn't. "You do," he says, with sudden certainty. "Just not in the way I wanted. It doesn't matter now." After a pause, he adds. "I'm… really sorry I tried to use the Imperius curse on your boyfriend."
"Mm, I was a bit angry about that. But given everything that's happened since… I think it's fair to say we're even, now."
He can't help but smile at her, and after a moment, Lily smiles back. It quickly fades. "I need to know something," she says. Finally, Severus can see it in her face; the courage to voice the question she's wanted to ask all along. “Does Harry survive?”
“He does. Or at least every time I live long enough to see it.”
She sobs, once, and her voice is tinged with a strange mixture of sadness and relief. “I never live to see it. I’ve tried so many things.”
Severus speaks as gently as he can. “Have you never tried… not having him?”
There’s a flash of pain in Lily’s eyes. “He’s my child, Sev. I can’t not have him.” Then she swallows, and adds, “I did try, once. It hurt—more than you can imagine—but I managed.
“It was the first time you went back to Slytherin. I’d started to get desperate. After Hogwarts, I took off to the Orkey isles and found a house. Lived there for three years. Roughly around the night Harry would have been conceived, something… happened.” She frowned. “The sky started to… distort. As if whole patches of it were simply disappearing beyond my vision. When I looked down at my hands, they were turning into dust. Then everything just… switched off.”
Realization is dawning on Snape, now. “It’s Harry,” he says. “He’s the point of origin.”
Lily nods. “I thought so, too. Do you ever live to see him grow up?”
“Until just before he turns eighteen, yes. I’ve never lived past that point.”
“Tell me about him,” she whispers, so he does.
They talk for a long time.
There are no windows in here, but by the time they’ve finished, Severus is certain that it must be dawn by now. They’re sitting cross-legged opposite each other on the plush carpet, and both of them have been crying on and off for the past few hours. Snape’s eyes are starting to get sore.
“Look,” Lily says. “No matter what we do, some things remain the same. I’ve tried to prevent my own death countless times. I’ve moved. I’ve installed expensive muggle burglar alarm systems. I’ve spent over a hundred years learning and perfecting defensive spells. Voldemort still bloody turns up.”
“We could try getting rid of him before that happens,” Snape suggests. “I know where most of his Horcruxes are.”
Lily frowns.
“I’m not sure it’s that simple,” she says. “I know about the prophecy. There’s no timeline where it doesn’t happen—even that time I went to Orkney—and it’s always the same wording. I think the prophecies might be… fixed points. Harry can’t exist without Voldemort. Time can’t progress without Harry.”
There’s a deep sinking feeling in the pit of Snape’s belly. “And Harry can’t survive without you dying to protect him,” he breathes.
She nods. Her expression is one of acceptance. “If it means he gets to live, I’m happy to do it,” she says. “I just don’t know what else we can change.”
Severus has a theory now. Part of him doesn’t want to tell her. He would endure death over and over just to see her again in the next life. But if they don’t break the loop, time will never continue past the point of his death. Harry will never grow old.
Perhaps, if he can’t give her life, he can at least give her this.
“I have an idea,” he says.
8.
For a long while after he wakes up again, he can’t stop weeping. His mother tries, distantly, to console him. His father comes in and beats him. Eventually, he is sent back to his room, and though he tries to keep his mind on other things, he can’t stop replaying those last few moments over and over.
“I think the loop doesn’t start when we become conscious,” Lily had explained. “I think it starts when you’re born. Otherwise, it feels like we'd both become aware at the same time, and that doesn’t happen. We just don’t remember anything until our brains are developed enough to process it.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Snape had asked.
“Then we have more than enough time to start over.” She took his hands, and squeezed them. “I want to live without knowing Harry will grow up without me. I want to love him without that constant gnawing pain. Please, Severus.”
He hugged her, once, and then said, through his tears, “Okay.”
He has lived long enough that the necessary spells should have come easily to him, but his wand-hand still shook with each Obliviate. Then, hurriedly, so he didn’t have to bear the empty confusion in her eyes for too long, he cast Avada Kedavra—twice. First on Lily, then on himself.
And yet despite the persistence of that horrible memory, it is worth it all to see her again the next day.
The Sorting Hat puts him in Gryffindor without even needing to be prompted. He makes friends, joins the Order, watches from the sidelines at Lily and James’ wedding. It is undeniably a better life than his first, even with that constant tinge of sadness.
On the night that Voldemort is due to arrive, he travels to Godric’s Hollow. It is not exactly the same plan as the one he described to Lily, but he doesn’t feel guilty for lying. This way is far easier, after all, and he is tired of living without her.
He’s done plenty of testing. The petrification charm he casts on James should last plenty of time, and with the Invisibility Cloak over him, Harry’s father should be safe until Voldemort is dealt with. Once that’s done with, he takes the polyjuice potion, and goes inside, and finally learns what it is like for Lily to look at him with love.
They have little over half an hour before Voldemort arrives. Severus spends it watching Lily rock Harry in her arms, tired but happy.
The theory is that James doesn’t need to die for Lily’s love to save her son. She only needs to think he is dead, and that she is the last thing standing between Voldemort and the most precious thing in the world. This way, perhaps, Harry will grow up loved and cherished, and whatever may happen after Voldemort finds him again, he will have a little more joy in the years before.
It’s worth a try.
He’ll see her again soon, either way.