Fic: Tantalus in Ink and Paint
Fic! *gasp!*
Title: Tantalus in Ink and Paint
Pairing: Severus Snape/Lily Luna Potter
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life to a hopeless love for the other.
Word Count: ~2700
Warnings: So many. Underage (In my mind, Lily has a September birthday like Hermione, so she turns 17 at the start of Sixth Year. Still, she's young), crossgen, darkness, Perverted!Portrait!Snape, sociopathic Lily, voyeurism, obsession, sex between portraits and between a portrait and a person, and <100 words of ASP/LLP incest.
A/N: This was started last October for julia_linnea's "20 Random Facts" Fest, but I ran out of time and nerve and only completed it last month. Many thanks to little_dollface for her comments and suggestions.
A/N2: Satisfies 052: Taboo on my 100 quills table and 11: inconsequential/unconsensual on my 15pairings table.
1.
After his death, Severus spends the next twenty years in the Headmaster's office. He could wander through the castle's paintings if he wanted, and certainly Albus encourages him to explore, but Severus quickly decides there's no benefit to it. He does not share the other portraits' desires to observe the children, to greet new students and watch them grow, and then eagerly mark the passage of time by the arrival of their descendants.
As disconnected as Severus becomes from Hogwarts' daily life, when sheer boredom does drive him from the office, he is surprised to discover a new generation in the castle, children of the last students he ever taught.
2.
He notices her name first and her hair second, and the two together make him nostalgic for the cool, green-shaded riverbank of his childhood before he can stop himself. The old fool, Slughorn, remarks to the teacher beside him what a lovely girl she is, so well named, so very like her dear grandmother.
Severus could tell him this is not true. The dark auburn hair spilling out under the brim of the Sorting Hat is the same, yes, but he can see this new Lily has the round face, brown eyes, and copious freckles of her Weasley mother. Lily Evans was not so confident at eleven, either. She didn't flounce up to the Sorting Hat with her chin high and a superior smile on her face. This girl is a Potter.
Still, there is something about her, some hint of the familiar, something Not-Potter and Not-Weasley that existed solely in Severus's memories until the moment of his death. It is enough to send him out into the corridor after the feast, to glower down and try to catch her eye. She passes under his painting with nary a glance in his direction, already absorbed in a gaggle of Gryffindors and slipping her way to the front of the pack.
3.
After four years of spying, Severus hates Lily Potter.
She is, he decides, only a marginally talented witch. With none of her eldest brother's charisma or her middle brother's warmth to recommend her to others, the youngest Potter trades heavily upon her famous name, manipulating the unwary and surrounding herself with sycophants. She cheats on her schoolwork, flaunts her wealth, and encourages her toadies to taunt the socially vulnerable.
It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life to a hopeless love for the other.
It is pure bad luck, he decides later, that she should look up from her table at that moment and spot him glaring at her from the still life behind Pince's desk. Her small face is feline and predatory, and the tongue she sticks out is pointed and rosy pink.
That tongue laps at his thoughts, and when he wakes the next morning from the torpor portraits call sleep, he is harder than he has been in decades, his guts twisting with arousal and self-disgust.
4.
Severus has better things to do in this painted limbo than lurk through the paintings gawking at a poisonous child, his favorite being the dark-haired harpist hanging in a forgotten alcove on the third floor. Although no brilliant conversationalist, she is buxom, dimpled, and after the sex, she sometimes plays her harp for him. If he is relaxed enough, Severus will even fall asleep in her bed.
The sex is almost good, but Severus learns quickly that even bad sex when alive is better than great sex as a portrait. In his ink and paint existence, he simply does not feel physical sensation with the same intensity he did when he was flesh.
And isn't it just his typical luck, he asks himself, that when Voldemort has gone to hell and he finally finds himself an attractive and willing bedmate, he should be dead and unable to fully enjoy it?
His motto has always been that something is better than nothing, though, and when he traces the curve of the harpist's hip, his world feels a little less flat. He is rougher than he should be, scoring her with his teeth and nails, slamming into her until her bed shakes and the strings of her harp vibrate in sympathy. The scratches she leaves on his shoulders in return fill with painless red paint and disappear quickly, but he feels great sympathy when he sees them and knows they're both chasing the same thing.
It fills him with unaccustomed tenderness, something so uncomfortable he considers leaving and not coming back. But what will he do with his time if he doesn't spend it-and himself-here? Go back to spying on Lily Potter, now a Fifth Year, using and discarding boys at an astonishing rate according to that gossipy Fat Lady? Does he want to see that?
Severus stays where he is.
5.
The last time he visits the harpist in her lonely frame is the first time he spots Lily watching them from the shadows, her hands moving rapidly under her skirt, eyes wide and glassy in the dark.
6.
The first time Lily touches him, it's early in her sixth year at the castle. Her fingers, slick with her own secretions, reach up to brush against his mouth, and he catches his breath in anticipation of a real touch, of real skin against any part of his body. He even parts his lips to taste her fingers.
Her hand is hot upon the canvas, but he otherwise feels nothing but the familiar muted sensations and his tongue tastes nothing but linen and paint. He is both crushed and relieved by the discovery.
7.
It is Lily who suggests Severus might like watching her as much as she enjoyed watching him. He sneers and calls her a pervert and a slut, but when she tells him she will be in an empty classroom at ten o'clock with fellow prefect Calum Whitby, Severus makes certain he is there and waiting by 9:30.
Lily's on her knees, the boy's skinny cock in her mouth, by 10:05.
She is loud and sloppy. Intentionally so, he thinks, and he could sneer at how crass and juvenile she is, but he's aroused anyway, as much by the sound of her slurps and the boy's moans as by the sights before him. When it is over, and she smiles sweetly up at Severus while wiping her chin with the edge of her robe, he slips behind a tree in his dreary landscaped perch, sinking down and barely unbuttoning his trousers in time to spill onto the painted dirt between his knees.
Severus never tells her he enjoyed watching, but when Lily informs him she has a date, he is never, never late.
8.
She pesters him for help with her homework and he refuses. "Helping" Lily Potter means doing the work for her. If she spent more time studying and less time whoring around the castle looking for someone willing to do her hard work while she reaps the rewards, he tells her, she would have done better on her OWLs than the string of Acceptables she took home. She pouts and continues to fuck boys in dark corners while Severus continues to watch them from the nearest painting.
Her grades improve anyway.
9.
After Christmas, Severus learns the secret behind her suddenly exemplary homework scores when an irate Harry Potter descends upon Hogwarts like an avenging angel and Professor Cosimos is abruptly removed from his position as Astronomy teacher.
Only the way Lily begs her father to not make the affair public spares the school from scandal, and McGonagall is grey-faced and shaking by the end of the day. No one, Albus assures her quietly, could have foreseen this, that an innocent child should be so victimized within the castle, and the other portraits commiserate as best they can. McGonagall holds her head in her hands and weeps.
For once, Severus is glad to be a portrait. Not even shame feels as sharp as it once did.
10.
He stays in the office for the rest of the school year. He tells himself it is for Minerva's sake.
11.
They never discuss it, but when Lily returns for her final year, Severus provides the answers to her assignments without arguing.
When he has dictated her essays, she stretches and sighs, as if even the act of copying is too much work. If she catches him staring at the thrust of her breasts when she arches her back, she'll smirk, but sometimes she will stand and take off her blouse, lazily slipping buttons through their holes and letting first the shirt and then her bra fall to the floor as she crosses the room to stand beneath the painting. Her breasts, coral-tipped and splattered with freckles, lift toward him as she reaches up to take his painting from the wall, and he licks his lips involuntarily.
She likes to prop him against the wall and rub herself against him, scraping her nipples over the rough oil paint and grinding against the frame. He opens his trousers and she pets him roughly, knowing by now that he needs the pressure. Even so, the sensation is muffled as if through thick cotton. But her heat is addictive, her breath warm and damp as it billows from her lungs, and he forgets he is nothing but paint and memories and reaches for her. His knuckles scrape against surface of painting, and she laughs until her orgasm chokes out the sound. She is red-faced and trembling, and Severus hates every freckled inch of her. But she bends and licks the head of his penis, grimacing at the taste of the paint, but following through until he comes against the painting.
Her tongue is discolored, and he wonders if she could lick all the paint away until there's nothing but bare canvass left.
He is glad she will be graduating soon so he can put all this behind him.
12.
Ten years after her graduation, Headmaster Longbottom announces during a staff meeting that Lily Potter will be returning to Hogwarts as Astronomy professor, joining her brother Albus, who took over the Care of Magical Creatures position the year before upon Hagrid's retirement. Severus feigns indifference, as he does each time Neville Longbottom speaks, but he immediately scopes out the Astronomy professor's office for convenient paintings.
13.
When she enters her rooms for the first time and sees him hanging above her bed in a painting of the night sky with constellations pinwheeling around his head, she laughs. Dropping her cases to the carpet, she climbs onto the mattress and kisses his painted mouth.
She chatters as she unpacks, scattering her belongings as carelessly as a child. He watches, not really listening, and rubs his lips together hoping to recapture that ghost of sensation.
14.
Lily is even less well-suited to teaching than he was. She is quick-tempered, distant, and devotes as little time as possible to lesson planning and instruction.
She is made head of Gryffindor House anyway; there might be no one on Earth who continues to be more impressed by the Potter name than Neville Longbottom. Severus laughs himself sick at the news and pities the poor Gryffindors.
15.
From the nightscape above her bed, Severus watches Lily seduce Longbottom, the new squib who became caretaker when Filch died, three school governors, two teachers, one Head Boy, and, after a drunken Christmas staff party, her own brother Albus.
It is sickening but arousing, a perverse train wreck, and Severus cannot make himself look away any more than he can resist wrapping his fist around his cock. Lily theatrically moans her brother's middle name-his name-and smirks at him over Albus's heaving shoulder, and Severus even smirks back.
Albus Potter resigns his position and moves to Romania before the school year is out, and no one claims to be more confused by his "mysterious depression" than his sister.
16.
When Longbottom dies too young, the Governors appoint Lily Potter Headmistress. In protest, the far more qualified Deputy Headmaster resigns his positions as Ancient Runes Professor and Head of Ravenclaw immediately after the funeral.
Instead of their usual cacophony of greetings and advice, the portraits welcome the new Headmistress with near silence. Severus, whose own appointment to the office so long ago was anything but routine, is surprised to feel a surge of anger as she walks around the room touching treasures that once belonged to Albus, to him, to Minerva. She doesn't deserve to be here, and when she carelessly rubs the soft textured leaves of one of Longbottom's many plants, he tells her so.
Maybe not, she replies, but at least she didn't kill anyone to get here.
Severus knows he should have kept his mouth shut. He should have avoided the office. He should have found the dustiest painting in the darkest, most forgotten corner of the deepest dungeon and stayed there until Lily Potter was nothing more than a painted shrew hanging on the wall. He knows he should have done anything except make her angry.
Because, in retaliation, she tells the other Heads everything.
17.
Albus and Minerva, and even Phineas Nigellus, stop speaking to Severus after that, and it seems every portrait in the castle knows exactly what he and the new Headmistress have been up to all these years. He spends most of his time in Lily's private rooms.
Even though he hates her now, something is still better than nothing.
18.
The night after she poses for the portrait that will one day hang next to Longbottom's, Lily lies naked on her bed and asks Severus what he will do when she is just a painting in a frame and he can finally get his hands on her.
He considers, watching her fingers dip between her parted legs. He could tell her that he will watch her learn that wanking as a portrait is almost unsatisfying enough not to be worth the effort. He could tell her he will fuck her until she should be raw and use his nails and teeth to score lines in her flesh that should hurt and that when she feels that absence of feeling, it will be the most satisfying experience he will have had in years.
Instead, watching her fingers disappear into her greying curls as she rubs her clit, he points out that he died at thirty-eight. By comparison, Lily is already an old woman, her body softening and surrendering to gravity, and by the time she hangs on the Headmaster's wall, she will be older still.
She stops, narrow-eyed and quiet, and when she climbs under her blankets and douses the lights without another word, Severus is not sure if he has just won a decisive victory or if he has lost everything.
19.
After her death, Lily's portrait is hung beside Longbottom's in the Headmaster's office, but she prefers her portrait in the Astronomer's Society, where Severus cannot follow. She never appears to offer the new Headmaster her advice, not even when called, and the other portraits generally agree this cements her position as the worst headmistress in Hogwarts' history, even worse than Ethelwige the Unwieldy, who forced Seventh Year boys to carry her up and down the office stairs.
Severus sincerely hopes somebody will burn both her portraits to ashes.
20.
After a few years, Albus is speaking to him again, and Severus rarely thinks of Lily. His relations with the harpist have taken up where they left off, and Severus tells himself that their encounters may be somewhat boring, but at least it's a release of sorts. It's good enough.
Or, at least he tells himself this until the day he looks down and sees one of the new Potters, grandchild of James or Albus. Messy black hair, anxious green eyes behind small glasses, the girl looks around, worrying a lush pink lip between small white teeth. She is so familiar, so Potterish, and Severus feels a rush of heat like he has not felt in years. He grips the frame in reaction, and the motion grabs the girl's attention. He smiles, close-lipped and as benign as he can manage.
"You must be a Potter. I know your family well."
Title: Tantalus in Ink and Paint
Pairing: Severus Snape/Lily Luna Potter
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life to a hopeless love for the other.
Word Count: ~2700
Warnings: So many. Underage (In my mind, Lily has a September birthday like Hermione, so she turns 17 at the start of Sixth Year. Still, she's young), crossgen, darkness, Perverted!Portrait!Snape, sociopathic Lily, voyeurism, obsession, sex between portraits and between a portrait and a person, and <100 words of ASP/LLP incest.
A/N: This was started last October for julia_linnea's "20 Random Facts" Fest, but I ran out of time and nerve and only completed it last month. Many thanks to little_dollface for her comments and suggestions.
A/N2: Satisfies 052: Taboo on my 100 quills table and 11: inconsequential/unconsensual on my 15pairings table.
1.
After his death, Severus spends the next twenty years in the Headmaster's office. He could wander through the castle's paintings if he wanted, and certainly Albus encourages him to explore, but Severus quickly decides there's no benefit to it. He does not share the other portraits' desires to observe the children, to greet new students and watch them grow, and then eagerly mark the passage of time by the arrival of their descendants.
As disconnected as Severus becomes from Hogwarts' daily life, when sheer boredom does drive him from the office, he is surprised to discover a new generation in the castle, children of the last students he ever taught.
2.
He notices her name first and her hair second, and the two together make him nostalgic for the cool, green-shaded riverbank of his childhood before he can stop himself. The old fool, Slughorn, remarks to the teacher beside him what a lovely girl she is, so well named, so very like her dear grandmother.
Severus could tell him this is not true. The dark auburn hair spilling out under the brim of the Sorting Hat is the same, yes, but he can see this new Lily has the round face, brown eyes, and copious freckles of her Weasley mother. Lily Evans was not so confident at eleven, either. She didn't flounce up to the Sorting Hat with her chin high and a superior smile on her face. This girl is a Potter.
Still, there is something about her, some hint of the familiar, something Not-Potter and Not-Weasley that existed solely in Severus's memories until the moment of his death. It is enough to send him out into the corridor after the feast, to glower down and try to catch her eye. She passes under his painting with nary a glance in his direction, already absorbed in a gaggle of Gryffindors and slipping her way to the front of the pack.
3.
After four years of spying, Severus hates Lily Potter.
She is, he decides, only a marginally talented witch. With none of her eldest brother's charisma or her middle brother's warmth to recommend her to others, the youngest Potter trades heavily upon her famous name, manipulating the unwary and surrounding herself with sycophants. She cheats on her schoolwork, flaunts her wealth, and encourages her toadies to taunt the socially vulnerable.
It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life to a hopeless love for the other.
It is pure bad luck, he decides later, that she should look up from her table at that moment and spot him glaring at her from the still life behind Pince's desk. Her small face is feline and predatory, and the tongue she sticks out is pointed and rosy pink.
That tongue laps at his thoughts, and when he wakes the next morning from the torpor portraits call sleep, he is harder than he has been in decades, his guts twisting with arousal and self-disgust.
4.
Severus has better things to do in this painted limbo than lurk through the paintings gawking at a poisonous child, his favorite being the dark-haired harpist hanging in a forgotten alcove on the third floor. Although no brilliant conversationalist, she is buxom, dimpled, and after the sex, she sometimes plays her harp for him. If he is relaxed enough, Severus will even fall asleep in her bed.
The sex is almost good, but Severus learns quickly that even bad sex when alive is better than great sex as a portrait. In his ink and paint existence, he simply does not feel physical sensation with the same intensity he did when he was flesh.
And isn't it just his typical luck, he asks himself, that when Voldemort has gone to hell and he finally finds himself an attractive and willing bedmate, he should be dead and unable to fully enjoy it?
His motto has always been that something is better than nothing, though, and when he traces the curve of the harpist's hip, his world feels a little less flat. He is rougher than he should be, scoring her with his teeth and nails, slamming into her until her bed shakes and the strings of her harp vibrate in sympathy. The scratches she leaves on his shoulders in return fill with painless red paint and disappear quickly, but he feels great sympathy when he sees them and knows they're both chasing the same thing.
It fills him with unaccustomed tenderness, something so uncomfortable he considers leaving and not coming back. But what will he do with his time if he doesn't spend it-and himself-here? Go back to spying on Lily Potter, now a Fifth Year, using and discarding boys at an astonishing rate according to that gossipy Fat Lady? Does he want to see that?
Severus stays where he is.
5.
The last time he visits the harpist in her lonely frame is the first time he spots Lily watching them from the shadows, her hands moving rapidly under her skirt, eyes wide and glassy in the dark.
6.
The first time Lily touches him, it's early in her sixth year at the castle. Her fingers, slick with her own secretions, reach up to brush against his mouth, and he catches his breath in anticipation of a real touch, of real skin against any part of his body. He even parts his lips to taste her fingers.
Her hand is hot upon the canvas, but he otherwise feels nothing but the familiar muted sensations and his tongue tastes nothing but linen and paint. He is both crushed and relieved by the discovery.
7.
It is Lily who suggests Severus might like watching her as much as she enjoyed watching him. He sneers and calls her a pervert and a slut, but when she tells him she will be in an empty classroom at ten o'clock with fellow prefect Calum Whitby, Severus makes certain he is there and waiting by 9:30.
Lily's on her knees, the boy's skinny cock in her mouth, by 10:05.
She is loud and sloppy. Intentionally so, he thinks, and he could sneer at how crass and juvenile she is, but he's aroused anyway, as much by the sound of her slurps and the boy's moans as by the sights before him. When it is over, and she smiles sweetly up at Severus while wiping her chin with the edge of her robe, he slips behind a tree in his dreary landscaped perch, sinking down and barely unbuttoning his trousers in time to spill onto the painted dirt between his knees.
Severus never tells her he enjoyed watching, but when Lily informs him she has a date, he is never, never late.
8.
She pesters him for help with her homework and he refuses. "Helping" Lily Potter means doing the work for her. If she spent more time studying and less time whoring around the castle looking for someone willing to do her hard work while she reaps the rewards, he tells her, she would have done better on her OWLs than the string of Acceptables she took home. She pouts and continues to fuck boys in dark corners while Severus continues to watch them from the nearest painting.
Her grades improve anyway.
9.
After Christmas, Severus learns the secret behind her suddenly exemplary homework scores when an irate Harry Potter descends upon Hogwarts like an avenging angel and Professor Cosimos is abruptly removed from his position as Astronomy teacher.
Only the way Lily begs her father to not make the affair public spares the school from scandal, and McGonagall is grey-faced and shaking by the end of the day. No one, Albus assures her quietly, could have foreseen this, that an innocent child should be so victimized within the castle, and the other portraits commiserate as best they can. McGonagall holds her head in her hands and weeps.
For once, Severus is glad to be a portrait. Not even shame feels as sharp as it once did.
10.
He stays in the office for the rest of the school year. He tells himself it is for Minerva's sake.
11.
They never discuss it, but when Lily returns for her final year, Severus provides the answers to her assignments without arguing.
When he has dictated her essays, she stretches and sighs, as if even the act of copying is too much work. If she catches him staring at the thrust of her breasts when she arches her back, she'll smirk, but sometimes she will stand and take off her blouse, lazily slipping buttons through their holes and letting first the shirt and then her bra fall to the floor as she crosses the room to stand beneath the painting. Her breasts, coral-tipped and splattered with freckles, lift toward him as she reaches up to take his painting from the wall, and he licks his lips involuntarily.
She likes to prop him against the wall and rub herself against him, scraping her nipples over the rough oil paint and grinding against the frame. He opens his trousers and she pets him roughly, knowing by now that he needs the pressure. Even so, the sensation is muffled as if through thick cotton. But her heat is addictive, her breath warm and damp as it billows from her lungs, and he forgets he is nothing but paint and memories and reaches for her. His knuckles scrape against surface of painting, and she laughs until her orgasm chokes out the sound. She is red-faced and trembling, and Severus hates every freckled inch of her. But she bends and licks the head of his penis, grimacing at the taste of the paint, but following through until he comes against the painting.
Her tongue is discolored, and he wonders if she could lick all the paint away until there's nothing but bare canvass left.
He is glad she will be graduating soon so he can put all this behind him.
12.
Ten years after her graduation, Headmaster Longbottom announces during a staff meeting that Lily Potter will be returning to Hogwarts as Astronomy professor, joining her brother Albus, who took over the Care of Magical Creatures position the year before upon Hagrid's retirement. Severus feigns indifference, as he does each time Neville Longbottom speaks, but he immediately scopes out the Astronomy professor's office for convenient paintings.
13.
When she enters her rooms for the first time and sees him hanging above her bed in a painting of the night sky with constellations pinwheeling around his head, she laughs. Dropping her cases to the carpet, she climbs onto the mattress and kisses his painted mouth.
She chatters as she unpacks, scattering her belongings as carelessly as a child. He watches, not really listening, and rubs his lips together hoping to recapture that ghost of sensation.
14.
Lily is even less well-suited to teaching than he was. She is quick-tempered, distant, and devotes as little time as possible to lesson planning and instruction.
She is made head of Gryffindor House anyway; there might be no one on Earth who continues to be more impressed by the Potter name than Neville Longbottom. Severus laughs himself sick at the news and pities the poor Gryffindors.
15.
From the nightscape above her bed, Severus watches Lily seduce Longbottom, the new squib who became caretaker when Filch died, three school governors, two teachers, one Head Boy, and, after a drunken Christmas staff party, her own brother Albus.
It is sickening but arousing, a perverse train wreck, and Severus cannot make himself look away any more than he can resist wrapping his fist around his cock. Lily theatrically moans her brother's middle name-his name-and smirks at him over Albus's heaving shoulder, and Severus even smirks back.
Albus Potter resigns his position and moves to Romania before the school year is out, and no one claims to be more confused by his "mysterious depression" than his sister.
16.
When Longbottom dies too young, the Governors appoint Lily Potter Headmistress. In protest, the far more qualified Deputy Headmaster resigns his positions as Ancient Runes Professor and Head of Ravenclaw immediately after the funeral.
Instead of their usual cacophony of greetings and advice, the portraits welcome the new Headmistress with near silence. Severus, whose own appointment to the office so long ago was anything but routine, is surprised to feel a surge of anger as she walks around the room touching treasures that once belonged to Albus, to him, to Minerva. She doesn't deserve to be here, and when she carelessly rubs the soft textured leaves of one of Longbottom's many plants, he tells her so.
Maybe not, she replies, but at least she didn't kill anyone to get here.
Severus knows he should have kept his mouth shut. He should have avoided the office. He should have found the dustiest painting in the darkest, most forgotten corner of the deepest dungeon and stayed there until Lily Potter was nothing more than a painted shrew hanging on the wall. He knows he should have done anything except make her angry.
Because, in retaliation, she tells the other Heads everything.
17.
Albus and Minerva, and even Phineas Nigellus, stop speaking to Severus after that, and it seems every portrait in the castle knows exactly what he and the new Headmistress have been up to all these years. He spends most of his time in Lily's private rooms.
Even though he hates her now, something is still better than nothing.
18.
The night after she poses for the portrait that will one day hang next to Longbottom's, Lily lies naked on her bed and asks Severus what he will do when she is just a painting in a frame and he can finally get his hands on her.
He considers, watching her fingers dip between her parted legs. He could tell her that he will watch her learn that wanking as a portrait is almost unsatisfying enough not to be worth the effort. He could tell her he will fuck her until she should be raw and use his nails and teeth to score lines in her flesh that should hurt and that when she feels that absence of feeling, it will be the most satisfying experience he will have had in years.
Instead, watching her fingers disappear into her greying curls as she rubs her clit, he points out that he died at thirty-eight. By comparison, Lily is already an old woman, her body softening and surrendering to gravity, and by the time she hangs on the Headmaster's wall, she will be older still.
She stops, narrow-eyed and quiet, and when she climbs under her blankets and douses the lights without another word, Severus is not sure if he has just won a decisive victory or if he has lost everything.
19.
After her death, Lily's portrait is hung beside Longbottom's in the Headmaster's office, but she prefers her portrait in the Astronomer's Society, where Severus cannot follow. She never appears to offer the new Headmaster her advice, not even when called, and the other portraits generally agree this cements her position as the worst headmistress in Hogwarts' history, even worse than Ethelwige the Unwieldy, who forced Seventh Year boys to carry her up and down the office stairs.
Severus sincerely hopes somebody will burn both her portraits to ashes.
20.
After a few years, Albus is speaking to him again, and Severus rarely thinks of Lily. His relations with the harpist have taken up where they left off, and Severus tells himself that their encounters may be somewhat boring, but at least it's a release of sorts. It's good enough.
Or, at least he tells himself this until the day he looks down and sees one of the new Potters, grandchild of James or Albus. Messy black hair, anxious green eyes behind small glasses, the girl looks around, worrying a lush pink lip between small white teeth. She is so familiar, so Potterish, and Severus feels a rush of heat like he has not felt in years. He grips the frame in reaction, and the motion grabs the girl's attention. He smiles, close-lipped and as benign as he can manage.
"You must be a Potter. I know your family well."