chiraldream (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lesyeuxverts) wrote2007-10-23 02:23 pm
lesyeuxverts) wrote2007-10-23 02:23 pm
Entry tags:
August nest of spiders: Severus/Lily ficlets
Title: Soonest Mended
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 300
Rating: PG
Pairing: Eileen, Severus, Lily (a hint of Severus/Lily)
Prompt: #4, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
After seven stitches, the thread snaps. Eileen holds it up, letting the light wash over her work.
Black is a forgiving color. She knots the two ends of the threads together and hides the bump in the hem. There are more mistakes than can be measured in this light – they will not be seen in the shadowy corridors of Hogwarts, not in the haze of torchlight or the gloomy classrooms.
The door swings open, Severus tearing into the house with the heat of summer on his heels. He dashes past her without a look, his face scrunched up and his hands balled in tight fists. Eileen pricks her finger, bringing it to her mouth to soothe the hurt.
The clear bell-tones of silence ring through the house. There's no sound from Severus's room, no indication that he is there.
Eileen presses his robes to her breastbone, and the thump of her heart resounds through her fingers. She fills the silence with the rasp of needle through cloth, the click of her foot against the floor keeping pace with her stitches.
Lily enters without a knock – almost a daughter of the house, she stands on no ceremony. She comes to sit at Eileen's feet, in the beams of sunlight spilling through the window.
Eileen's thread snaps, the sound echoing through the room. "Watch," Lily says, putting a finger to the break. It's mended without a word, the halves spun back together.
Biting her lip, Eileen watches Lily dash off to Severus's room. Some things are unlearned – some things are learned at Hogwarts.
Lily drags Severus out the door, pulling him by the hand and smiling over her shoulder at Eileen.
The echoes die away and silence fills the house – she takes up her mending again. September first will come soon enough.
-----
Title: Snakeskin
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 400
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Lily/James, Lily/Severus
Prompt: #12, "Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!" -Dumbledore, Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone
Warnings: DH spoilers, infidelity
Disclaimer: Not mine.
AN: The song is Anne Murray's You Needed Me
Without the pieces of snakeskin left at the door, layered in careful white coils on the gray flagstone, Lily would have known that it was Severus. There is a tickle in the air, a hint of honey and spices – she lets herself into the kitchen, and he's there.
Sitting slumped at the table, he watches the spin of the record player. Steam rises from the tea into a hazy cloud. He doesn't see Lily.
The record spins, and Severus sets the needle back. "I sold my soul – You bought it back for me – And held me up and gave me dignity – Somehow you needed me."
Lily steps forward to touch his shoulder. "It will be James, one day," she tells him. "If you sit here ..."
"Of course not. He'd never walk past the snakeskin with such aplomb."
Severus watches her, lips twisted. "When the screams of righteous Gryffindor outrage echo through the Hollow, I'll know it's time to take my leave."
She takes a cup of tea from him. Defense of her House, defense of her husband, defense of her choices – she says nothing. Bitter and unsweetened, the tea is made the way that Severus likes it.
" You gave me strength – To stand alone again – To face the world – Out on my own again."
Lily reaches for the sugar, and he catches her wrist. He holds her hand, twisting it to look at her palm and trace the veins. "It's safe enough with you," Severus says at last, bent over her palm like a fortuneteller. "You should have been one of us."
Coils of snakeskin left on her doorstep, the smell of Severus in the air, the scratch of the record, the coils of life growing in her belly – Lily leans into his touch. "You needed me," she says with the record, a slow and lilting croon that fades into the silence between them, washing it clean. "You needed me."
"I need you," he says. He sets the needle back, and they're caught in the loop of this song again.
Like magic, the music speaks for them – she moves to touch him, and there's a world of conversations in the brush of their hands.
Severus pulls her closer, and she rests in the circle of his arms. "Like snakeskin," she says, fingering the rough lapel of his dark robes. "Shed and reborn – Death Eater – oh, Severus. Make me forget."
-----
Title: Summer Promises
Author: lesyeuxverts
Word Count: 300
Rating: G
Pairing: implied Severus/Lily
Prompt: #17, "There is more truth in honest lies, Believe me, than in half the truths." -Samuel Butler
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
There are eleven leaves left on the low-hanging bough – the pear tree was stripped by the last summer storm. Severus raises a hand, reaching for them, and they bob in the breeze.
Lily dabs cream on her freckles, wrinkling her nose at him. "Will this work?"
"I made it, didn't I?"
Severus pillows his head on his hands, leaning back to look up at the sky. Through the lacework of the branches, there's the scuff-scurry-skim of the threadbare clouds.
Lily is beautiful with freckles, golden sun kisses on her cheeks. The potion is calla and honey, quince and apple blossoms, and nothing but scent and smoothness. There's no magic to it at all.
"What will it be like at Hogwarts?" Lily asks. She dabs his nose with the cream, and there are seventeen freckles on her cheek – seventeen kisses. The sun has been sweet to her this year.
"We've been over this," Severus tells her. "Magic and potions and a library – ghosts, a poltergeist, unicorns in the Forbidden Forest. You'll love it."
"It will be wonderful." She rubs the cream into his nose, her fingers gentle enough to tickle. "So many new friends to make, spells to learn, all of the magic –"
"Of course," Severus says. "You know that."
She's dappled with sunshine, the shadows of the last pear leaves flickering over her cheekbones, and she's bright with prattle and nerves.
"And we'll already be the best of friends." Lily twists around, leaning against the tree, and runs her fingers through the grass.
"Indeed." Severus watches the last leaves fall, tossed tip-over-stem by a strong gust.
Lily's fingers skate down Severus's face, pausing to brush his lips and jaw. "I'll never forget you," she says, "no matter how many friends I make. No matter how many friends you make."
-----
Title: the first traceries of light
Author:![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
lesyeuxverts00
Beta:angela_snape
Word Count: 700
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Severus/Lily
Prompt: #25
"For we saw him throw to the swift flood
A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;
All the fishes were rayed in blood,
Said the dwindling ships"
- Dylan Thomas, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
The fish pop, minnows bursting under Lily's feet, and she makes a disgusted face. Severus shouldn't have brought her here.
The fishermen are silent, with the whip of their hooks into the water and low murmur of the river and the pop of the minnows underfoot for their company. Lily hangs back, and Severus pulls her with him.
"You watch the sun set from the very end of the pier, and you make a wish on the first falling star," he tells her. "That's the wish that comes true."
At the end of the pier, they look out onto the line where storm-sky and mud-river meet, an impossible narrowing of the horizon to a single point. Severus takes Lily's hand, holding it in his own and waiting for the last moment of sunset.
Her fingers are cold.
Like a fish floundering for water, Lily falls off the pier. Her clothes are dark against the muddy water and her face is a pale oval, blurred and indistinct.
She falls for forever, and Severus cannot stop her.
She clings to his hand as she falls, and he lets her go – like a fisherman, he baits a hook with a minnow, casting the line down to her.
The hook catches in her lip, and her mouth is swollen and bloated. Blood floats out into the water, a diffuse swirl over the spiky fan of red-gold hair. With swollen lips, she can't accuse him of pushing her.
She's gone, fading into the river, and boats pass and dwindle into the distance.
Severus wakes to nothing. His neck is stiff from sleeping at the desk, and his bones ache in the absence of her. Reaching for a potion to soothe the pain, he checks himself.
The silence echoes in the Headmaster's office, the portraits banished and the phoenix gone. He has ensured this silence, he needs it to hear. He has set listening spells throughout the castle, ready to carry the sounds of treason or screams. They come to this office, a delicate tracery of spells – they are too fine and delicate to be detected by any but Voldemort, and he will not come here yet. That is Severus's safeguard.
The castle is his, full of spells and spies and traps. A last burden, a last bequest from Albus, a last duty – Severus strengthens the wards, waiting until he is needed. The call will come – a student's pain in the corridors, a hint of dissension wafting from Filius's quarters, a breath of pain coming from Minerva. All of this is his – this, and restless sleep, and dreams.
The call will come, and take him away from these dreams.
Albus, fallen at the base of the Tower – Longbottom, standing defiant before the Carrows, shaking with aftershocks of pain – Potter's hand, scarred and Lily's lips, asking him where his vaunted protection was – Nagini, curled in coils around the throne, sated and sleepy – Severus is no stranger to bad dreams, and this was only one more.
He rises, making a circuit of the office – this shelf, where Albus's whirligigs sat, and here where the portrait of Phineas Nigellus hung – here, where Fawkes had perched, and here is where he had stood at the window when Albus had made his final request. Severus banishes the first hints of dust from these places with a blasting spell, and the hot air billows around him, warming his face and fluttering in his robes.
Looking out over the grounds from that window, Severus watches the first traceries of light over the grass, highlighting each blade and dancing under each tree. True dawn comes soon.
Lily pulls her hand from his, straining to lean over the edge of the pier, and he catches her, one hand on each shoulder, and pulls her back. She's warm and fluttering against him, her heartbeat loud enough to echo through his chest.
"Be more careful," he tells her.
She turns in his arms. "What did you wish for?"
"I can't tell you," he says. "If you tell, it never comes true."
They walk home in the dusk, minnows popping under their feet, and the streetlights glow electric-blue on her hair, and Lily lets him take her hand.
-----
Title: The Last Blow
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 200
Rating: R
Pairing: Snape/Lily (unrequited)
Prompt: #27, "I was cold and trembling and on the point of vomiting, but it was more than that. It was an attack of the truth: I saw quite clearly that there were no dreams and no mercy left in the world, nothing but a storm of violence." -- From John Braine, Room at the Top, 1957.
Warnings: Graphic violence
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Lily shattered at the last blow – the image of her that Severus kept close, her porcelain skin and sun-loved hair, his hopeless dreams. She was gone, fading away to memory, when the Muggle's head rolled across the floor.
The last blow had done it, had sent the head rolling and shattered Severus's vision of his Lily.
He shuddered, cold despite the thick black robes and dirty despite the clothes and spells that saved him from grime and blood. His arm ached from the spell, his wand still thrumming with the power and recoil of the last blow.
The vibrations ran through Severus, shaking him through to the bone.
Lily was shattered, his vision of her gone, and the world was flat without her. Entire colors were lost. The green glint of her eyes when she smiled, the pink curve of her lips, her porcelain skin – all of her colors lost the right to exist.
Severus waited until the other Death Eaters had left before he knelt in the pool of blood. He reached out, closing the Muggle's eyes – that green had no right to shine with final tears, no right to be dull and clouded, no place in this world.
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 300
Rating: PG
Pairing: Eileen, Severus, Lily (a hint of Severus/Lily)
Prompt: #4, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
After seven stitches, the thread snaps. Eileen holds it up, letting the light wash over her work.
Black is a forgiving color. She knots the two ends of the threads together and hides the bump in the hem. There are more mistakes than can be measured in this light – they will not be seen in the shadowy corridors of Hogwarts, not in the haze of torchlight or the gloomy classrooms.
The door swings open, Severus tearing into the house with the heat of summer on his heels. He dashes past her without a look, his face scrunched up and his hands balled in tight fists. Eileen pricks her finger, bringing it to her mouth to soothe the hurt.
The clear bell-tones of silence ring through the house. There's no sound from Severus's room, no indication that he is there.
Eileen presses his robes to her breastbone, and the thump of her heart resounds through her fingers. She fills the silence with the rasp of needle through cloth, the click of her foot against the floor keeping pace with her stitches.
Lily enters without a knock – almost a daughter of the house, she stands on no ceremony. She comes to sit at Eileen's feet, in the beams of sunlight spilling through the window.
Eileen's thread snaps, the sound echoing through the room. "Watch," Lily says, putting a finger to the break. It's mended without a word, the halves spun back together.
Biting her lip, Eileen watches Lily dash off to Severus's room. Some things are unlearned – some things are learned at Hogwarts.
Lily drags Severus out the door, pulling him by the hand and smiling over her shoulder at Eileen.
The echoes die away and silence fills the house – she takes up her mending again. September first will come soon enough.
-----
Title: Snakeskin
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 400
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Lily/James, Lily/Severus
Prompt: #12, "Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!" -Dumbledore, Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone
Warnings: DH spoilers, infidelity
Disclaimer: Not mine.
AN: The song is Anne Murray's You Needed Me
Without the pieces of snakeskin left at the door, layered in careful white coils on the gray flagstone, Lily would have known that it was Severus. There is a tickle in the air, a hint of honey and spices – she lets herself into the kitchen, and he's there.
Sitting slumped at the table, he watches the spin of the record player. Steam rises from the tea into a hazy cloud. He doesn't see Lily.
The record spins, and Severus sets the needle back. "I sold my soul – You bought it back for me – And held me up and gave me dignity – Somehow you needed me."
Lily steps forward to touch his shoulder. "It will be James, one day," she tells him. "If you sit here ..."
"Of course not. He'd never walk past the snakeskin with such aplomb."
Severus watches her, lips twisted. "When the screams of righteous Gryffindor outrage echo through the Hollow, I'll know it's time to take my leave."
She takes a cup of tea from him. Defense of her House, defense of her husband, defense of her choices – she says nothing. Bitter and unsweetened, the tea is made the way that Severus likes it.
" You gave me strength – To stand alone again – To face the world – Out on my own again."
Lily reaches for the sugar, and he catches her wrist. He holds her hand, twisting it to look at her palm and trace the veins. "It's safe enough with you," Severus says at last, bent over her palm like a fortuneteller. "You should have been one of us."
Coils of snakeskin left on her doorstep, the smell of Severus in the air, the scratch of the record, the coils of life growing in her belly – Lily leans into his touch. "You needed me," she says with the record, a slow and lilting croon that fades into the silence between them, washing it clean. "You needed me."
"I need you," he says. He sets the needle back, and they're caught in the loop of this song again.
Like magic, the music speaks for them – she moves to touch him, and there's a world of conversations in the brush of their hands.
Severus pulls her closer, and she rests in the circle of his arms. "Like snakeskin," she says, fingering the rough lapel of his dark robes. "Shed and reborn – Death Eater – oh, Severus. Make me forget."
-----
Title: Summer Promises
Author: lesyeuxverts
Word Count: 300
Rating: G
Pairing: implied Severus/Lily
Prompt: #17, "There is more truth in honest lies, Believe me, than in half the truths." -Samuel Butler
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
There are eleven leaves left on the low-hanging bough – the pear tree was stripped by the last summer storm. Severus raises a hand, reaching for them, and they bob in the breeze.
Lily dabs cream on her freckles, wrinkling her nose at him. "Will this work?"
"I made it, didn't I?"
Severus pillows his head on his hands, leaning back to look up at the sky. Through the lacework of the branches, there's the scuff-scurry-skim of the threadbare clouds.
Lily is beautiful with freckles, golden sun kisses on her cheeks. The potion is calla and honey, quince and apple blossoms, and nothing but scent and smoothness. There's no magic to it at all.
"What will it be like at Hogwarts?" Lily asks. She dabs his nose with the cream, and there are seventeen freckles on her cheek – seventeen kisses. The sun has been sweet to her this year.
"We've been over this," Severus tells her. "Magic and potions and a library – ghosts, a poltergeist, unicorns in the Forbidden Forest. You'll love it."
"It will be wonderful." She rubs the cream into his nose, her fingers gentle enough to tickle. "So many new friends to make, spells to learn, all of the magic –"
"Of course," Severus says. "You know that."
She's dappled with sunshine, the shadows of the last pear leaves flickering over her cheekbones, and she's bright with prattle and nerves.
"And we'll already be the best of friends." Lily twists around, leaning against the tree, and runs her fingers through the grass.
"Indeed." Severus watches the last leaves fall, tossed tip-over-stem by a strong gust.
Lily's fingers skate down Severus's face, pausing to brush his lips and jaw. "I'll never forget you," she says, "no matter how many friends I make. No matter how many friends you make."
-----
Title: the first traceries of light
Author:
lesyeuxverts00Beta:
angela_snapeWord Count: 700
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Severus/Lily
Prompt: #25
"For we saw him throw to the swift flood
A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;
All the fishes were rayed in blood,
Said the dwindling ships"
- Dylan Thomas, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait
Warnings: DH spoilers
Disclaimer: Not mine.
The fish pop, minnows bursting under Lily's feet, and she makes a disgusted face. Severus shouldn't have brought her here.
The fishermen are silent, with the whip of their hooks into the water and low murmur of the river and the pop of the minnows underfoot for their company. Lily hangs back, and Severus pulls her with him.
"You watch the sun set from the very end of the pier, and you make a wish on the first falling star," he tells her. "That's the wish that comes true."
At the end of the pier, they look out onto the line where storm-sky and mud-river meet, an impossible narrowing of the horizon to a single point. Severus takes Lily's hand, holding it in his own and waiting for the last moment of sunset.
Her fingers are cold.
Like a fish floundering for water, Lily falls off the pier. Her clothes are dark against the muddy water and her face is a pale oval, blurred and indistinct.
She falls for forever, and Severus cannot stop her.
She clings to his hand as she falls, and he lets her go – like a fisherman, he baits a hook with a minnow, casting the line down to her.
The hook catches in her lip, and her mouth is swollen and bloated. Blood floats out into the water, a diffuse swirl over the spiky fan of red-gold hair. With swollen lips, she can't accuse him of pushing her.
She's gone, fading into the river, and boats pass and dwindle into the distance.
Severus wakes to nothing. His neck is stiff from sleeping at the desk, and his bones ache in the absence of her. Reaching for a potion to soothe the pain, he checks himself.
The silence echoes in the Headmaster's office, the portraits banished and the phoenix gone. He has ensured this silence, he needs it to hear. He has set listening spells throughout the castle, ready to carry the sounds of treason or screams. They come to this office, a delicate tracery of spells – they are too fine and delicate to be detected by any but Voldemort, and he will not come here yet. That is Severus's safeguard.
The castle is his, full of spells and spies and traps. A last burden, a last bequest from Albus, a last duty – Severus strengthens the wards, waiting until he is needed. The call will come – a student's pain in the corridors, a hint of dissension wafting from Filius's quarters, a breath of pain coming from Minerva. All of this is his – this, and restless sleep, and dreams.
The call will come, and take him away from these dreams.
Albus, fallen at the base of the Tower – Longbottom, standing defiant before the Carrows, shaking with aftershocks of pain – Potter's hand, scarred and Lily's lips, asking him where his vaunted protection was – Nagini, curled in coils around the throne, sated and sleepy – Severus is no stranger to bad dreams, and this was only one more.
He rises, making a circuit of the office – this shelf, where Albus's whirligigs sat, and here where the portrait of Phineas Nigellus hung – here, where Fawkes had perched, and here is where he had stood at the window when Albus had made his final request. Severus banishes the first hints of dust from these places with a blasting spell, and the hot air billows around him, warming his face and fluttering in his robes.
Looking out over the grounds from that window, Severus watches the first traceries of light over the grass, highlighting each blade and dancing under each tree. True dawn comes soon.
Lily pulls her hand from his, straining to lean over the edge of the pier, and he catches her, one hand on each shoulder, and pulls her back. She's warm and fluttering against him, her heartbeat loud enough to echo through his chest.
"Be more careful," he tells her.
She turns in his arms. "What did you wish for?"
"I can't tell you," he says. "If you tell, it never comes true."
They walk home in the dusk, minnows popping under their feet, and the streetlights glow electric-blue on her hair, and Lily lets him take her hand.
-----
Title: The Last Blow
Author: lesyeuxverts00
Word Count: 200
Rating: R
Pairing: Snape/Lily (unrequited)
Prompt: #27, "I was cold and trembling and on the point of vomiting, but it was more than that. It was an attack of the truth: I saw quite clearly that there were no dreams and no mercy left in the world, nothing but a storm of violence." -- From John Braine, Room at the Top, 1957.
Warnings: Graphic violence
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Lily shattered at the last blow – the image of her that Severus kept close, her porcelain skin and sun-loved hair, his hopeless dreams. She was gone, fading away to memory, when the Muggle's head rolled across the floor.
The last blow had done it, had sent the head rolling and shattered Severus's vision of his Lily.
He shuddered, cold despite the thick black robes and dirty despite the clothes and spells that saved him from grime and blood. His arm ached from the spell, his wand still thrumming with the power and recoil of the last blow.
The vibrations ran through Severus, shaking him through to the bone.
Lily was shattered, his vision of her gone, and the world was flat without her. Entire colors were lost. The green glint of her eyes when she smiled, the pink curve of her lips, her porcelain skin – all of her colors lost the right to exist.
Severus waited until the other Death Eaters had left before he knelt in the pool of blood. He reached out, closing the Muggle's eyes – that green had no right to shine with final tears, no right to be dull and clouded, no place in this world.
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