I Only Live For You

A/N: So, everyone, despite having another story waiting in the wings for me to finish, I went ahead and got rediculously inspired for this one.

It's almost a companion peice to "Every Second Of My Life," like following the two different men who once loved Lily, and how different thier lives were. Sort of. Also, "I only live for you" is the line that follows "Every second of my life" in Morrissey's Life Is A Pigsty.

I promise I'll have another chapter of Remus' story up soon, but until then, it's angst city.

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My story begins and ends with her.

Lily.

There have been a few people over the years who have claimed to know me, to be friends with me. This is far from the truth. It was necessary to retain moderate relations with my Death Eater cohorts, as well as my Hogwarts colleagues and Order members. But in all my life, only a handful of people can really be said to have been loved by Severus Snape.

My mother. In many ways, she is part of the coldness that grew inside me, the base of my emotionless self that served me and hindered me so well over the years. However, she was the first person I ever spoke to, unfettered, about anything.

Dumbledore. At first, I hated him, hated him for failing to protect Lily, for forcing me to protect her son. I began to realize, however, that I hated him for the love he spoke of, his ‘most powerful force in existence’ nonsense. I grew to both love and despise him for it. And then, of course, he used this to manipulate me into murdering him.

The man should have been a Slytherin.

And there are others, I suppose, who I respected, who I perhaps enjoyed speaking with on rare occasions.

But in all my life, there has never been another who I have loved as my Lily.

May I call her that? Here in the house of death, all things are known, and I know James Potter’s heart as he knows mine.

I digress.

I was beginning with Lily.

I first laid eyes on her as she walked home from the primary school, skipping with her sister. I suppose, though we attended the same Muggle school, we were in separate classes; I’d never seen her before. My first thought upon seeing her, was that I wanted to be the one to laugh with her.

I followed them. Their house wasn’t strictly out of the way from mine, so I didn’t feel I was being very strange.

I would feel that later.

I watched Lily and her sister playing carelessly. They began to race, screaming their laugher and joy to the world. And then…

They approached a gate at the end of an alleyway. Lily was winning, she looked back at her sister as Petunia slowed down, seeing their way blocked. Lily ran through the solid wood gate.

It clearly shocked Petunia, but did not surprise her. They stopped their playing, hurried home. But my heart was leaping. She was like me…

Even then, even before my mind and body had begun to know or understand what it was to love a woman, I knew she was beautiful.

Her red hair was out of style then, as such trivial things sometimes are, and I knew she was picked on for it, something I related to far too well.

I was jealous of her sister, at first. She would quickly come to be replaced by James Potter, of course, but as a child I only saw how much Lily loved Petunia, how they would spend so much time together, playing, talking.

The wizarding world doesn’t set much store in the Muggle science of psychology, but I would have been a veritable treasure trove for any child psychologist. Perhaps if my mother hadn’t Obliviated away the social workers who stopped by from time to time, my life would not have been so…interesting…

My point on the topic of the subtle workings of the mind is a simple one. I had always been somewhat alone with my mother in my childhood. I shared her only with my father, who was the dark to her light, but I’ll get to that. My mother was there for me and me alone, or so my scarred, undeveloped mind imagined.

So when I saw Lily prefer another’s company over mine, I was irrationally angry.

As I grew older, I began to see that my parents were not the embodiment of black and white. My mother could have easily destroyed my father whenever their arguments grew into violence, but as much as she yelled back at him, cursed, she never drew her wand when he struck her.

When I was seven, I let loose my undeveloped powers on my father. They were fighting again, he was just raising his hand to strike her, when I felt the gas lines and the igniter inside the oven, and decided somehow that they should meet.

My father sustained first-degree burns. He never knew it was me. My mother did, though, she’d felt the energy surge from where I cowered in the corner.

Later, as she put me to bed, she made me promise never to do it again, never to hurt my father. She was teaching me about love.

One day, Eileen Prince met Tobias Snape at a Muggle market, and fell in love. She found that she was pregnant, ran away from her pureblood past and married him. That is all I know of their relationship. I do not know when he began to subconsciously harbor such poison for her, whether it was the day she all but trapped him into marriage, or when she told him that she was a witch.

Perhaps they had been happy, once. I do not remember that.

So this was my first example of love. Suffice to say, I did not recognize that emotion when I began to feel it for Lily.

She was some kind of beacon in those years, from meeting her to going to Hogwarts. We would meet down by the riverbank, talk, play silly little games. Her sister never joined in, not after what I’d done to hurt her in my childish anger, and I liked it that way. Petunia had no magic; therefore she was like my father.

Lily’s parents were always kind to me, though I could tell I bothered them. I bothered most people, with my look and often unpleasant mannerisms. That, and my parents had their little reputation in that neighborhood.

It never concerned me terribly much that I was poor, on a certain level I simply wanted to be invisible, and my clothes and appearance never gave me that luxury. Unable to fit in, I forced myself to rise above average, to excel.