you raise me up || harry potter (revamped)

Chapter 7: The Mirror of Erised

Snape wondered if Dumbledore told him where the Mirror was being kept for any reason other than to make sure unruly students out of bed past curfew didn't accidentally stumble upon it. Knowing Dumbledore, it was probably also because he knew Snape wouldn't be able to resist.

Snape hated how well the man knew him.

It was just the beginning of his patrol, Snape reasoned as he strode through the corridors. It gave the late stragglers some time to rush back to their dorms. He would withhold his wrath for some other night. Tonight, he wanted to know how the mirror would aim to torture him.

For ten years, Snape scarcely allowed himself to lower his Occlumency shields, to examine anything close to his heart. Desire was something he was familiar with, yet something he kept locked away in the depths of his soul, always under lock and key without fail.

Very well, Erised, Snape thought with a bitter sneer. Do your worst.

The classroom was dark, the floor dusty. A sliver of moonlight cut across the glass of the mirror, and for a moment, Snape took comfort in the normalcy of the image it reflected. A disused classroom, just a few desks. But he resolutely placed himself in front of it. For an instant, he thought the mirror was empty. Until he looked down, and found himself staring into the dark eyes of a much younger Severus Snape.

They stared at each other.

Suddenly, the boy in the mirror was lifted up into the air by his ankle, robes spilling down his thin body, arms dangling limply, his hair, greasy even back then, falling away from his face instead of hiding it like it so often did.

Snape stumbled back. An icy blade tore into his ribs. No. Not this.

Even upside down, the boy in the mirror stared at Snape through the glass, unblinking and expressionless.

James Potter emerged into the surface of the image, laughing as he held his wand up, gesturing to the rest of the Marauders who were hazily coming into view. They all suddenly startled, clearly from something they heard.

No. No...

Lily Evans stomped into view. The slight, brief twitch of her mouth as she fought a smile.

Snape thought his heart would stop.

Because he knew what was coming next. He knew all the words, like the lyrics of the worst song in the world refusing to leave his consciousness as the figures in the mirror mouthed along...

Leave him alone!

Ah, Evans, don't make me hex you.

Take the curse off him, then!

No. No. Not this. Never this. Because he knew how it went, he knew the words that came next, he knew what would come out of his mouth...

But even as the boy in the mirror struggled to get to his feet after the begrudging countercurse, he stared at Snape with those unblinking dark eyes.

And he said nothing.

Snape stared for a moment longer into those eyes. His own eyes. Eyes which were twenty years younger, but still his own.

He left the room, and the mirror, and the Marauders, and Lily. He left himself, those eyes, knowing that they were pleading him, pleading for a chance to make it all right again by just keeping his mouth shut, although he knew his mistakes began long before that fated, despicable word. He could never make it right, when he had so easily made it all go wrong, so wrong that his worst memory had ingrained itself into his deepest desire.

The punishment of time was the cruelty of her permanence.

♢♢♢

"You could have woken me up," Draco said crossly when Harry told him about his midnight wandering and his discovery of the mirror in the classroom. They sat on Harry's bed with their legs crossed, still in their pajamas. Harry had insisted on not telling the story until everyone else went to breakfast; Slytherins could be a very nosy bunch.