Chapter Text
Then Sirius died.
There was no gentle way for that truth to exist. It arrived like everything else in Harry’s life had arrived since he was eleven: sudden, violent, and irreversible. One moment Sirius Black was alive—reckless, loud, unfinished—and the next he was gone, falling through a veil. The space he left behind was not dramatic. It was quiet. Too quiet. A silence that did not demand attention so much as it eroded it, day by day.
Sirius had promised him stories. Had promised him, in installments, the slow unfolding of how Lily Evans had finally come to love James Potter—not the boy he had been, but the man he became. Harry had believed him. He had held on to that promise with a strange, careful hope, as though it were a thread that might eventually lead him somewhere solid.
Now there would be no more installments.
The story ended where it was.
Then Dumbledore died.
If Sirius’s death had torn something open, Dumbledore’s sealed something shut. There was a finality to it that Harry felt in his bones. Dumbledore had always seemed like a fixed point in the world—ancient, patient, watching from a height where panic could not quite reach him. To lose him felt like losing the idea that someone, somewhere, understood what was happening.
Dumbledore had spoken of Lily only once to Harry in any depth. He had told him that his mother was kind, and brave, and courageous, and that her love was what had protected him from Voldemort’s cold, cold hands. He had said it plainly, without embellishment, as though stating a fact as unarguable as gravity.
Harry had believed him.
He still did.
But kindness and courage were not the things that kept him awake at night.
Remus tried to give him the stories still. Harry knew that. He saw it in the way Remus hesitated before changing the subject, in the way his eyes flicked toward Harry whenever Lily’s name surfaced, as though measuring how much weight the boy could carry that day. But Remus was a haunted man, and increasingly unwilling to speak of the ghosts that followed him through his days. He had spent too long surviving to indulge in memory. Some things, Harry suspected, were simply too sharp for Remus to touch without bleeding.
And then there was no time for stories at all.
The war rolled on.
Harry did not return to Hogwarts in the way he was supposed to. When he did come back, it was not as a student returning to familiar corridors, but as a soldier returning to a battlefield. Voldemort and his Death Eaters came with him, tearing through the place Harry had come to think of as home with cold, deliberate violence. Towers fell. Corridors burned. The Great Hall filled with bodies instead of banner
Harry hunted the last fragments of Voldemort’s soul with a single-minded desperation that left little room for reflection. There were no quiet evenings, no safe kitchens, no stories told slowly over tea. There was only urgency. Only necessity.
He saw Voldemort order Severus Snape’s death without hesitation, without cruelty, without mercy. It was done the way one discarded a tool that had outlived its usefulness.
In his final moments, Snape gave Harry his memories.
They did not begin at Hogwarts. They began before wandwork and Houses and rivalries—before Lily Evans had become anyone important at all. They showed her as a child.
Lily Evans, small and bright-eyed, crouched in a patch of grass. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, her tongue caught briefly between her teeth. Petals trembled in her palms as flowers burst into life at her touch. The magic was wild and untrained, spilling outward with careless beauty. Lily stared at it with something like delight—and then, almost immediately, with calculation.
She tried again.
Slower this time. More deliberate.
Harry watched, transfixed, as she adjusted without being told how. As she refined something instinctive into something chosen.
Snape’s memories lingered on her confidence. Lily did not apologise for her magic. She did not fear it. She accepted it as something natural, something that belonged to her. When Severus spoke—eager, breathless, reverent—she listened, but she did not defer. She corrected him when he was wrong. She laughed when he grew too intense.
Harry noticed how often she walked ahead of Snape, how rarely she waited to be led. She did not follow. She assumed she would be followed.
That much fit easily with what Remus and Sirius had told him.
The Lily in Snape’s memories was already decisive. Already opinionated. Already possessed of a certainty that made other children orbit her. She was not cruel—but she was capable of dismissal. When she was bored, she turned away. When she was displeased, she did not hide it.
Petunia appeared in the memories too, though Snape’s recollection held on to Harry’s aunt differently than Lily ever had. There was distance there. Discomfort. Something sharp and resentful. Petunia and Snape traded glares and insults, their hostility a low, constant hum beneath everything else.
Harry’s grandparents drifted in and out of the edges of the memories like warm background light. In some scenes, Snape stood awkwardly in the Evans’ kitchen, clutching his books while Harry’s grandmother offered him food with a pitying kindness that made the boy stiffen. Lily’s mother had Lily’s expressive mouth and quick smiles; she was blonde, like Petunia, her neck long and graceful. Lily’s father had a longer nose and gentler eyes, the sort that creased easily with laughter.
They watched Lily with fond indulgence, pride barely restrained.
They loved their magical daughter. That much was unmistakable.
Harry felt something tighten in his chest as the memories lingered on Lily’s face in moments of stillness. He saw it then—the inheritance written plainly. The curve of her cheekbone echoed a grandmother glimpsed briefly in a mirror-lined hallway. The shape of her eyes—almond, bright—matched her mother’s exactly. Even the way she frowned in concentration, mouth pulling slightly to one side, felt achingly familiar.
He had seen that expression before.
On his own face.
At Hogwarts, the memories sharpened. Lily grew taller, brighter, more formidable. She was brilliant—there was no denying it—but the brilliance was accompanied by impatience. Harry saw her argue with teachers, her voice controlled but relentless. He saw her defend classmates who could not defend themselves. He saw her turn her back on cruelty with an expression that suggested disgust rather than fear.
He tried to connect this Lily to the one Sirius had described: the baker, the woman who fell asleep nursing her child, the girl who laughed through her wedding reception.
Some of it fit.
Her decisiveness. Her intolerance for injustice. Her sharp tongue.
Other parts did not.
Snape’s memories did not show warmth easily. They did not linger on her laughter unless it was directed at Severus. They did not show her softness unless it was something she was withholding. Harry knew better than to trust them completely.
Snape had loved Lily Evans in a way that distorted her edges, exaggerating some features while erasing others. In his memories, Lily was always central, always luminous—but she was also distant. She moved away from him steadily, inevitably, and the memories followed her with a bitterness they could not disguise.
When Severus crossed lines she had drawn carefully and clearly, Lily did not plead. She did not bargain. She did not explain herself more than once. She told him he was wrong. She told him he was choosing things she could not accept.
And then she left.
It aligned uncomfortably well with what Remus had once said: Lily’s kindness had edges. Snape’s memories did not show hesitation. They did not show regret. Lily did not look back, no matter how he pleaded.
Harry wondered—quietly, guiltily—whether that capacity for finality had frightened people who loved her. He wondered whether James had ever been afraid of disappointing her. He wondered whether Lily’s love was conditional—not in the sense of being fragile, but in the sense of being bound to values she would not compromise.
That, too, fit.
Some things, however, refused to align.
Snape’s Lily was lonely in a way Sirius’s Lily never was. She was surrounded by people, admired, sought after—but the memories framed her always in opposition. Always defending. Always standing firm.
Sirius had spoken of her laughter filling rooms. Remus had spoken of her easy companionship. Snape’s Lily seemed sharper, harder, almost solitary.
Harry traced lines where he could.
The child who experimented with her magic became the student who excelled in Charms and Potions. The girl who walked ahead became the woman who led. The child who corrected Severus became the adult who refused to excuse him.
Other lines dissolved.
The Lily who loved Muggle storybooks did not appear in Snape’s memories. The Lily who baked, who sang badly, who chose nursery colours—those belonged to Sirius’s Lily, to James’s Lily, to a domestic life Snape had never been part of. He knew there were gaps everywhere. Snape did not follow Lily into friendships that did not include him. He did not record moments of domestic warmth or ordinary teenage silliness.
Snape’s Lily was brilliant, incandescent, and increasingly unreachable.
Harry accepted that.
Snape had given him Lily’s beginning. Remus and Sirius had given him her middle. The end belonged to no one. Lily’s final days, in that little cottage in Godric’s Hollow, were hers and James’s alone.
Harry stepped out of the Pensieve in Dumbledore’s old office and descended the stairs on legs that felt strangely numb. Below, he saw Remus’s body.
He remembered the last thing Remus Lupin had ever told Harry about his mother, in Bill and Fleur’s living room. James had wanted to name you after his grandfather. Remus said, giddy with joy over Teddy’s birth, Henry. Then Lily refused, said it was too posh. She wanted you to be ordinary.
Perhaps, Harry thought, she had not wanted her son to grow up embracing his death at seventeen.
But Harry would have to do that anyway.