Dreamless Sleep
For Lily’s sixteenth birthday, Severus made her a ring.
It had been a long day, Petunia had demanded that she get to plan the party, inviting more of their snobby relatives and her friends, who were all much older than Lily. She’d felt incredibly small the entire day, where everybody treated her like a child even though it was supposed to be her birthday.
She’d snuck out to meet him once the sun fell down, her parents wouldn’t let him stay over once they got older. The shoes she wore were her mums, slightly too big for her, and she found herself stumbling as she ran down the hill to the river.
They sat there for a long time, in the grass. Later, her sister would fuss over her ruining her dress (that she ever so graciously allowed Lily to borrow), but nothing really mattered then. All that mattered was the treeline behind them as the river swooped past the forest, and Severus.
He was nervous to show her, but she really didn’t understand why.
It was one of the things she always loved the most about magic, the beauty of it all, the way you could shape dull things into something entirely new. The ring itself was made of twisted vines, preserved with magic. They connected, weaving around a tiny lily flower. He gave her something she could have forever, life that would never die.
She got a lot of gifts that day. Expensive coats and shoes from her wealthier relatives. But that was the most thoughtful thing she’d ever received.
It’s still there, hung low on a long gold chain around her neck.
Lily always had a hard time letting things go.
“Lily?” He asks, his voice low.
Fuck, shit, shit, shit, shit shit shit shit shit shitshitshitshitshitsh-
She shakes her head to clear it, though she knows he’s following the movement. Because, that’s just it, isn’t it? He knows her. As much as she knows him.
“I’m fine. We don’t even really have to talk about anything. It just needs to look like we are.” Lily dismisses, her voice a hushed whisper.
The plan is relatively simple: they picked Pandora Lovegood for their subject. They need someone they know will spread the word for them, without being asked. Originally, Lily had offered up Charity, but Severus dismissed that idea. She was a gossip, but she’d never spread a secret of his.
Sometimes, Lily forgets that he made friends in Slytherin. Ones that aren’t entirely awful.
She rarely sees them, and honestly she’d avoided Severus entirely after ‘ The Incident’. So sue her if she didn’t notice Severus and Charity becoming ‘besties’.
Either way, they had Pandora. Who, bless her soul, is the sweetest, but an awful gossip. It’ll be news in itself, Severus and Lily speaking again. Especially in an empty classroom.
They’ve positioned themselves right in front of the window, Lily leaning on a desk, Severus with his arms crossed. He looks entirely rigid, tense like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He twitches every once in a while, as if his body is physically trying to jump out of itself.
Pandora always goes on a walk at the same time everyday, after Astronomy. It wasn’t very hard to track the path she takes and find out which windows line up with it.
Some might call it stalker behavior, but Lily thinks that it’s more of a simple observation. Obviously.
“Wait—” Lily starts, shifting a bit and crossing her arms. “I think I see her.”
Pandora appears, ducking beneath a willow tree and running into a skip. She’s clutching two books close to her chest, and she does a little twirl as she walks. On her shoulder is an abnormally large stick bug, though the girl doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it actually seems to quite like her.
Lily, without thinking, reaches forward and hits Severus lightly on the stomach to get his attention. She pulls back like she’d been burned, realizing what a casual gesture it was. Severus’s eyes meet Pandora and he gets into character immediately.
He always was a good actor.
“We have to talk about something. ” He says, his voice agitated. She can’t tell if he’s actually upset or not. They’re supposed to be acting upset, but it sounds so real coming from him.
“Okay…” Lily scours her brain, which feels a little slower under his gaze. “How are your classes?”
She fights a flinch at how awkward she’s being, because usually she’s actually a pretty good conversationalist. Outside the window, she can see Pandora getting closer, her footsteps zig-zagging without much purpose.
“How's my… classes?” Severus asks, a very slight hint of a playful mock behind his angry facade.
Lily doubles down, too late to back out now. “Thank you for asking Severus.” She responds with an eye roll. “School’s great, I’m head girl and all that… you know.” She shrugs, still trying to look upset. “Nothing big.”
He rolls his eyes back at her, ignoring her jab. “My classes are fine.”
Pandora’s watching them now, curiously, Lily can see her head tilt through the corner of her eye.
“We have potions together today.” She points out, raising her voice and rubbing her temples as if he just said something particularly irritating.
Severus follows her lead, rolling his eyes and turning away with his nostrils flared. He takes two steps away from her, towards the door. “Yes, we do.”
She almost feels herself smile, for some god awful reason. “The professor sucks.” It was something she’d been waiting to say the entire year. She says it with a scowl on her face, as if to say, walk away. I don’t care.
He turns around suddenly, his eyes wide and his expression furious. “He’s a fool.”
Lily has to hold back her laugh, because it’s such a mundane conversation. Come tomorrow, everybody will think that they were arguing, when really they’re talking about what a fool their professor is.
“It’s like he doesn’t even know how to brew a potion!” She exclaims, raising her voice to prevent a laugh from breaking out.
Pandora walks away, slowly, and Lily puts her head in her hands and laughs. It’s a true thing that comes from the heart, something she hadn’t felt in a while. Severus is staring at her like he’s never seen her before, with those same wide eyes, his lips upturned ever so slightly.
It hits Lily then, the gravity of it, and she kicks herself.
She shouldn’t be laughing. Nothing about this is fun. It’s necessary, business even. Nothing’s changed. She still hates him.
Lily frowns at herself and leaves the room without saying a word.
Severus watches her leave like she’s grown a second head.
Lily is up before she normally is the next morning. Actually, she hadn’t slept the entire night. She took to pacing around midnight, a luxury she never had before she moved into the head girl dorm.
She hated that Severus was still on her mind, that the plan she made was seemingly affecting her more than it was him. If it was supposed to hurt anybody, she didn’t want it to be her. But there she was, lying in bed, awake.
Severus Snape took her best friend away from her, and now he’s taking her sleep.
Lily thinks he should make a career in thievery.
At five a.m. Lily decides that it’s a socially acceptable time to wake up. Carefully, she gets up from her bed and pads over to the restroom. The girl staring back at her looks exhausted, with a shade of deep purple painted under her eyes and a frown on her lips. She sighs, tying back her hair. Lily applies a few beauty charms along with her freshening ones.
After she’s dressed and had two cups of coffee she makes her way to McGonagall’s office.
James isn’t there for their meeting. She frowns, she hadn’t even thought to check on his dorm before she left. He’s never missed one before. She sees him at breakfast and eyes him curiously, waiting for the usual onslaught of begging, pleading, and bargaining.
But he doesn’t say a word to her.
She watches, waiting for something, anything. Remus, Sirius, and Peter don’t talk either, the three of them silently butter their toast without looking up. The air isn’t tense, exactly, but she feels like she’s missed something.
It’s sort of peaceful, She thinks as she reaches for the strawberry jam.
Lily feels a pull, like a string of magic breaking, and she looks up. Severus is already looking at her, though she can only see half his face through the crowd of people. He arches an eyebrow, his gaze darting to James before his eyes meet her again.
They both feel it, the weight of what it means:
Their plan is working.
It’s a funny thing, because she used to know exactly what to do.
Lily was never a natural at anything, she was good at many things, sure, but only because she worked at it. Unlike Petunia, who’s a ballet prodigy, or her mum who can grow plants seemingly with her sheer will alone.
There was one constant, one thing she always knew. Severus. She’d never known anybody, or anything like she’d known him. Lily must’ve read hundreds of books in her life, poured over words thousands of times, but there wasn’t a single word in the English dictionary she knew better than his name.
Maybe that’s why it hurt so much, because she understood why he said it.
She knew him so well, but knowing and feeling are two different things. Lily can agonize over it for the rest of her life, going through all the different ways it could’ve gone, but it doesn’t change the way she felt when it happened.
Neither of them can ever go back, Merlin knows that they would if they could, but that day is lost on them.
She’s sure, as she stares at the back of his head, that she can never forgive him. It’s a feeling beyond her, something greater and out of her control.
Lily wants to scream at him: You were never supposed to do that. It hurts, Severus. It hurts because you were my best friend first. Over anything, you were my best friend.
The class moves around her, shuffling seats and the tick of time. The professor drags on, waving his wand to demonstrate a spell.
Halfway through the class he has them pick partners. Lily bites the bullet.
She holds her head high, and finds her seat next to Severus. Curious eyes follow her as she sits down, running her hands over her skirt to smooth it. Severus stares at her, his brief surprise gone in a moment and replaced by a calm sort of indifference.
They're brewing a potion of their choice from the unit they just finished out. She stares up at the list the Professor has written out, it’s all incredibly easy, the kind of thing they teach first years. The two of them roll their eyes, nearly in sync. Lily pulls out her cauldron.
“Dreamless sleep.” She states.
“Simple.” Severus points out, taking out his own cauldron. He starts on the ingredients.
Lily snorts. “For us, maybe.” She eyes the rest of the class, all of whom worship the Professor as if he knows all the secrets to the universe. They couldn’t be more helpless. “And anyway, we have things to discuss.”
He nods, grabbing a bundle of lavender from the shelf next to them. Wordlessly, he separates it into two and hands her one. “It’s worked thus far.”
“-Wormwood” She cuts him off, and he hands it to her. “Yes, it has, but it only gets harder from here.” Lily tightens her ponytail until it pulls at the base of her skull. “We need to discuss steps moving forward.”
“Perhaps you confide in a friend? Tell them the ‘story’” He uses brief air quotes.
“No, we’re in the ‘friend’ stage right now. We can’t be together just yet.”
“So we wait.” He moves deftly, his hands experienced as he moves around the table in sync with her, chopping lavender and scraping wormwood in one inch increments.
“For a bit… maybe–” Someone wanders over to the shelf next to them, shuffling through the ingredients. Lily shifts gears, raising her voice ever so slightly. “Well that’s what I said! But of course Petunia never listens–”
Severus follows her lead, his eyes darting up to the intruder briefly. “-Petunia always was hard to persuade.” ‘
“Exactly! And–” They walk away with a bundle of sticks. “ Maybe, ” She continues, “We do something– something that will make people think we’re getting closer again.”
“Why–” He pauses, scooping up his lavender and dropping it into the cauldron. Severus stares ahead, his hands gripping the end of the table. “I could be seen at your dorm.”
Her heart stops, briefly, but it patters up again and she shakes her head, thinking. “James would see you.”
“That is the point, no?”
“I suppose…” She sets the wormwood down, “Yes, okay, you’ll come to my dorm say… every other day?”
Severus shakes his head. “Sparratically. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday would be better.”
Lily nods, her head racing almost as fast as her heart. “Right…that sounds good.” The professor says something she doesn’t catch.
They look at each other genuinely for the first time since she sat down. She feels nervous, sick, almost. His pupils are blown wide, searching her face in twitchy movements. And there’s something there, something tangible that she doesn’t quite understand. Severus opens his mouth to say something.
“Alright students! Set down your cauldrons and return to your original seating, we will resume brewing tomorrow!”
The moment is gone as quickly as it came.
Lily doesn’t sleep at all that night.