He was a small boy. Slim. His hands seemed almost girlish—the way the fingers, slender, ended in very soft, rounded fingernails. The underside of the hands were rough with work, stained and scarred, but the top of them looked like Lily’s hands. That was the first thing he noticed. Then he saw the hair. It was none of Potter’s wild mane, it was much more like Lily’s—thick, glossy, lying close to the head but with a slight curl, at the ends. When he moved his head, the hair moved, and it’s movement was so like hers it made his heart clench painfully. He watched the boy, when he thought no one was looking—he watched him walk down the halls, across the Quidditch pitch, watched him slide into a desk in a classroom. He’d watch him spread out his parchment, sharpen his quill deftly with those skilled fingers, reach and brush the hair out of his eyes.

His eyes. His eyes were pure Potter. A deep brown that pulled Snape from his memories as quickly as any twinge from his mark. The eyes made his look closer, made him look at the roughness of the boy’s hands, with their scars and the callous, made him note the way his hair was really more auburn, not true red. He’d note the way the boy ran, so like his father, the way he threw his head back when he laughed, the way he flew, so unlike Lily, so coarse, so brash. The way his mouth flattened into a line when he was in trouble, sullen, none of Lily’s fire. The scar that told him, every time he saw it, ‘You were too late. She’s gone.’  And then, looking into the boy’s eyes, those damned eyes, and seeing that it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t. Lily was, above everything else, entirely unique. A treasure, a pearl, something that doesn’t come around every day. Something that can never be replaced, can never be remade or remolded. She was something that lit up the world, and with her dead, the light would never come back.

So he looks at the boy, sees Potter’s hazel eyes, and he feels his mouth set into a sneer and his heart tighten and he takes points to see the ugly scowl—a scowl that would never darken Lily’s face—and he knows. And he does everything he can the only way he knows how—with bitterness, with anger, with sneers and cold gestures and taunts. And when, in the end, he has done everything he needs to do, when the boy himself is kneeling over him, as he thrusts his memories at the boy, he closes his eyes and prays to see Lily.

But she isn’t there.