Chapter 02

Just as Severus and the Guardians faded into nothingness, Sirius stumbled over a tree-root and fell. It didn’t hurt, for the ground was soft, but he didn’t get up afterwards. Instead, he just lay back and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of Lily’s crying and James’s murmured attempts at comforting her. He felt for her – it must be hard to know that part of the reason why Severus had to go through even more pain was that he loved her. And yet, he knew that she didn’t realise what Severus would face. She hadn’t been there, nor had James, and so they couldn’t understand. Not like himself, or Peter.

Had anyone ever told him when he had still been alive that he would feel almost worried sick over the fate of Snape, he would have laughed at them and afterwards sent them to get their head checked at St. Mungo’s. Now, however, he found it hard to comprehend how he could have been so stubborn and hateful.

“Do you think he’ll make it?”

He looked up and saw that Peter had come over and sat down next to him. He looked just as worried as Sirius felt.

“I have no idea.” He sat up as well, elbows on his knees, staring into the direction where he had seen Severus last. “I wish I could be optimistic, but...” He trailed off and sighed. If Severus were to make it, it would be incredibly hard on him.

“I know.” Peter’s hand found his and squeezed lightly, and Sirius had to smile, but it didn’t last long. They sat in silence for a while, hands entwined, each lost in their own thoughts.

“I’m not sure he’ll even manage the initial stage,” Sirius said in the end. “So many don’t, and he seems just like the kind of person who’ll want to dwell on it endlessly.”

Peter shook his head. “He’s strong, you know that. Look at all he did when he was alive.”

“This is different,” Sirius insisted. “He’s always let himself be driven by his passions. That way, he’ll be lost forever. And even if he makes it through everything – what about the Last Test?”

That rendered Peter silent for several minutes. Lily’s sobs had abated by now, and all that could be heard were the birds and the water and the rustling of the trees.

“You never told me about yours,” Peter finally said softly.

Slowly, Sirius pulled back his hand from Peter’s hold. “I told you, it wasn’t as...as innocent as yours. It was different. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t be silly. You know you can’t hurt me, not here. At least not for long. And whatever it was – we’re here now, that’s all that matters.”

“I know. It’s just...” He hesitated, then turned and looked Peter in the eyes. “I’ll tell you, I promise. Just not now, okay?”

After some moments, the other man nodded, then got up. “Let’s go home. I don’t want to stay. Not right after they got him from here.”

Sirius looked over to Lily and James, the former’s head hidden against the latter’s chest, with his hands stroking her hair, a sad expression on his face.

“All right, let’s go. I just hope we’ll one day come back here to welcome him home.”

Peter said nothing, but simply held out his hand again, and Sirius took it and got up. Together, they slowly made their way away from the clearing until they had disappeared between the trees.

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Severus shivered and pulled his robes closer around himself. It was a vain gesture, though, for he had long realised that the cold permeating his every fibre would not be detained by even the thickest of clothes. It was always cold here, and the icy winds howling around every corner did never cease. It had taken him only minutes after his arrival to be chilled to the bone, and now he did not even remember ever being warm any more. Even the concept of warmth was slowly fading away from his mind.

He did not know how long he had been here, since there was no way to measure the time. There was no day and night, just an endless, dubious twilight over the dreary wasteland that stretched in every direction, strewn with dilapidated buildings, piles of rubble and dead trees, like a long abandoned theatre of war.

When the darkness had first disappeared and the scenery had presented itself to him, he had been shocked and confused. For some time, he had wandered the wasteland, watching its inhabitants: some of them stumbling along like him, others huddled in doorways to find shelter from the wind, again others simply lying on the burnt ground, seemingly uncaring or unaware of the cold. Some were clad in newer clothes, but most were wearing torn and dirty rags, and a considerable number was even completely naked, shaking almost convulsively in the cold as they were deprived of even the symbolic comfort that clothing provided.

None of them seemed to care about the presence of the others, for they never spoke to him or anyone else, nor did they even look up as he passed by. The air was filled with the never-ending howling of the wind, and in between there was a cacophony of voices, screaming, moaning, crying, babbling incoherently, like in a gigantic madhouse full of lost causes.

In the end, he had realised that it would be useless to go on. His devastated surroundings never changed – one ruined house was replaced by another, one heap of ashes by the next, and all the whimpering, muttering wretches around him seemed faceless and interchangeable, destroyed and marked equal by their miserable existence in this place.

He had finally sat down in the doorway of a ruin and wrapped his robes around himself, waiting. He didn’t know for what, but he had still clung to the faint hope that this couldn’t be everything. It was impossible that he had simply been banished to this dreadful place after all he had gone through. Something would happen. Had not Black and the Guardians said that there would be help? He would not have to stay for long, and surely, he would not end up like the others here. He was stronger than that, had always been. How often had he been close to giving up, but had persevered in the end? It would be the same here.

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Time had gone by, but he didn’t know how much. To him, it had seemed endless, but if it had been days, or even weeks, he could not tell. At first, he had thought he might be able to tell by counting how often he would sleep, but he had soon realised that it would not work: just like there were no day and night, there was no tiredness here, and no sleep. Hunger and thirst did not exist, either, and so, distracted by nothing but the cold, his thoughts slowly but inevitably had turned toward the reason for his presence here.

Lily.

It was so incredibly unfair, he thought, that even now, even in death, she had been ripped away from him once again. But then, of course, the notion of fairness was a ridiculous one. Life wasn’t fair, so why would death have to be? No, death was just a cruel mimicry of life, in which some, like Potter or Black, got everything, and others, like him, ended up with empty hands, and nobody seemed to think it was anything but the natural order of things.

He had been astonished to realise some time ago that his robes were he same robes in which he had died...and that they still held the page of Lily’s letter and the torn-in-half photograph. Since then, he had spent a great deal of his time simply staring at her picture, or reading the last words of the letter over and over again.

Love, Lily

Of course, the words were not directed at him, had never been. He could play pretend for however long he wanted, but the truth was that he was only deceiving himself.

The longer he had been sitting there, cold, alone, and deprived of everything but those bitter feelings, the more every other thought had become unimportant compared to these – how once again everything he had ever cared for had been taken from him, and how instead, others had been blessed with it.

Finally, despite his resolution to not give in to it, Severus was overcome with despair and wept.

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Sounds penetrated the hazy fog that was usually separating his mind from his surroundings. Severus blinked and tore off his gaze from the photograph he had been staring at. It was a loud, shrill wailing, audible even over the wind, and as he let his eyes wander over the area in front of his doorway, he saw a woman who right now stopped wandering around uselessly, instead slumping to the ground next to some pile of debris, hands entangled in her hair, mouth opened wide as she cried out again and again.

Severus sighed and turned his back to the scene, trying to block out her voice. He succeeded after what felt only like a short while – by now, he had had enough exercise after all. It wasn’t that he was disturbed by the various displays of misery around him, no; he barely even registered them any more. He simply did not want anything to distract him from his own thoughts, which seemed so much more important than anything else could possibly be.

With a small smile, he turned his attention to the picture of Lily once more and went on stroking it gently, like he had been doing before, his fingers stiff and shaking from the cold. Lily was smiling at him, the vibrant colour of her hair and eyes in stark contrast to the dull shades of grey of his surroundings. She looked so alive – the only thing alive in this place of suffering and destruction, and the only thing that was real and worth caring about.

Lily. The only thing he had left.

Looking at her, he liked to imagine that she saw him, that she knew he was here, and that he was the reason why she was smiling. And hadn’t she smiled when he had arrived in the afterlife? Hadn’t she thanked him, held him, shown that she loved him? Sometimes, these thoughts made him almost feel warm inside, but they were harder and harder to conjure, the more time passed by.

In the end, his thoughts always returned to the fact that he had lost her, not once, but three times in a row: when she had rejected him at school, when she had died, and when he had been taken away from Elysium. Each time, the realisation hurt more, a piercing pain that made his innards clench so tightly that he could feel bile rising in his throat, a bitter taste in his mouth, tears pricking behind closed eyelids like needles.

After the pain came the hate, inevitably, like low tide came after high: pictures of Black, and Pettigrew, and Potter flashing before his inner eye, all of them not alone, not hurting, like he was, but smiling, joking, happy. And with them was Lily.

This time was no different from all the others, and even when the woman outside had long screamed her throat raw and fallen silent, Severus was still clutching the picture to his chest, rocking himself in the rhythm of his painfully beating heart, trying to forget, failing.

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He didn’t know what it was, but sometimes, he realised that something was happening to him. He was changing, and it frightened him. But whenever he tried to think more deeply about it, whenever he tried to concentrate, to find out what exactly was happening, the thought was swept away in an overwhelming wave of indifference.

What did it matter, after all? Here, wherever he was – he had known it once, but that, too, had slipped from his mind – it was of no significance. Nothing really mattered, nothing but her, the woman on the photograph. Lily. She, and the fact that she wasn’t here. She was elsewhere, he knew, happy, with people whose names he did not remember, but didn’t care about, either. He hated them, hated them because he had always done so, and for the fact that they were allowed to be with her, while he was not.

Most of the time, that was all that occupied his mind, but sometimes, sometimes he noticed. Something was wrong with him, terribly wrong, and it did not stop, but went on, changing him – or maybe it didn’t change him, after all. Maybe it was the opposite. Maybe, at the end of the process, he would see his true self.

During those brief moments of awareness, Severus wished that he was dead, and that any kind of afterlife was no more than a fairytale.

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“No.”

It was the first word in an eternity, his voice sounding rough and weak, shaking with shock and disbelief.

“No, no, no, no, no!”

He had forgotten it. Just one word, but the most important one in the world, and he did no longer remember.

Wide-eyed, he stared at the torn photograph, like he had been doing forever. She smiled at him, like she always did. How could that be? He had not been thinking of anything but her since he had arrived here, so long ago that he did not remember where he had come from, or what he had done before. As long as he could remember, all he had been doing was sitting here, in this doorway, with the wind soughing outside in a world he did not care about, looking at her. Loving her. Missing her.

She meant everything to him, and yet, he had forgotten her name.

He was close to panicking when he remembered something. A letter! Her name was on the letter! He hectically fumbled with his shabby robes to get the letter out, but when he finally had it, it slipped from his frozen fingers, and a sudden gust of wind took it away.

“NO!”

Frantic, Severus stumbled to his feet, his every muscle screaming in protest as he demanded something from his body that it had not done for far too long a time. Clutching the photograph in his hand tightly, he tried to run after the piece of paper that was fluttering away through the air – but it was too late. The wind was too strong, and he was too weak, and within seconds, the letter was no longer in sight.

Severus dropped to his knees and screamed.

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Meanwhile, far away, another man was slowly fading, and then led away by two Guardians.

Several people were staring after him in shock, including a woman with brightly pink hair who was clinging tightly to a handsome man for support.

“It’s not fair,” she sobbed, “it’s just not fair!”

Sirius held Tonks closer, burying his face against her hair, and it was costing him all his willpower not to burst out crying as well.

At the edge of the clearing, Remus Lupin disappeared into thin air.