Chapter Text
Here’s the thing about Time –
It is beautiful. It is a mystery. It is infinite, it is always running out, and it is, above all else, dangerous. Who better than the Girl Who Died, the woman who lives more than thirty hours out of synch with the rest of her reality, to dance with it? Your understanding of the very thing that has both saved and damned you is the only reason you wear the Triquetra; the only reason you were courted by the Department of Mysteries even before your NEWT results were finalised; the only reason you can feel the Fracture of the Sacred Loop like a crack in your bones, an urgency tugging at you as you seethe at your father with one breath and swear to Severus Snape that everything will be all right with the other.
(This is a lie.)
Here’s the thing about Time –
It is a closed loop, but not always, which means sometimes when one travels back in time to fix a mistake, they just end up causing the very thing they sought to prevent, and the loop is complete; but sometimes, when one travels back in time to fix a mistake, they make things worse, and that creates its own loop (a Paradox) that cannot be resolved without further intervention, which then recreates the original loop.
(Usually.)
There is only one (1) approved reality, carefully monitored by the Time Room deep within the Department of Mysteries: the Sacred Loop, with its own deviations and rewrites and loops. You have observed and helped maintain fixed points in time, like Aunt Hermione’s three–hour intervention with your father to save Sirius Black’s life: to the teenagers in 1994, it would have felt as though they changed reality, but all they did was ensure it happened – Black always survived that night. You have even just participated in another loop that created the very spell that kept you alive twice over: six months in the past, assisting a younger Draco Malfoy research and create the very Stasis Charm that saved your life, yet now you know it could never have existed without you.
The thing is, these events were always meant to happen. Everything was always meant to happen, except when it’s not, which is when Unspeakables such as yourself step in to correct the Fractures.
When the Triquetra burns, it can only mean one thing – the violent disintegration of the Sacred Loop, and it radiates outwards from one specific fixed point in time.
So what do you do? The obvious thing, of course: you slip through the fabric of Time to the moment of the Fracture, James’s heart pounding in terror, knowing only that if you allow the deviation to occur on the night of 2 May 1998 – specifically, the death of Severus Tobias Snape – then reality as you know it will be unmade.
Here’s the thing about Time –
There is no past, present and future, because all of time happens all at once, but humans are only capable of seeing it one moment, one day at a time. You are, technically, in the past; you are also in your own future, and you are in your (teenage) father’s present. What happens on the night of 2 May 1998 is the culmination of thousands of decisions that have been made and have yet to be made; it cannot and never will exist in a vacuum.
The night of the Battle of Hogwarts is a grim, dour setting, the air heavy with the weight of death and terror, and yet it feels in a way like an old friend – Merlin knows you have met death enough times and felt more terror than anyone reasonably should be expected to in the number of years you have lived. You have visited the Battle before on a previous trip, to observe and stop other would–be time travellers with their home–made Time Turners and ancient rituals, neo–Death Eaters who want to turn the tide of the battle in Voldemort’s favour, or devastated people trying to save their loved ones.
None of those created a Fracture as severe as this one.
There, in the Shrieking Shack, you hide, you watch, and you wait, hidden in the shadows as the subjective past plays out in real time. You watch as Severus Snape – who looks so young, so tired, so tormented – pleads with Voldemort to let him find the boy. You watch as Voldemort turns Nagini on him, the great snake’s fangs piercing his neck. You watch the Dark Lord abandon Snape on the grotty floor in a pool of his own blood, his fingers clutching his shredded throat. You watch as your father – only seventeen, younger than you – step out of his own hiding place to approach the dying man, bending over him. You watch Severus lash out with a hand, grabbing Harry by the front of his robes to rasp take it; you watch his memories pour out of his mouth and ears and eyes, gathered by Aunt Hermione into a flask.
Everything happens exactly as Harry said it did – exactly the way it’s written in all the history books about the War. Severus passes out, his hand falling to the floor with a heavy thump – assumed dead. Voldemort’s speech giving the Order an hour to dispose of their dead and treat the injured – one hour for Harry to give himself up.
You wait until Harry, Ron and Hermione leave the Shack to win the Battle to rush to Severus’s side. A pulse, you think. There should be a pulse, because if Severus Snape dies here, tonight, right now, alone and forgotten on the dank floor of this horrible place haunted by echoing screams, then your reality as you know it will vanish, and you will vanish with it – because there is no Lily Luna Potter without Severus Snape.
Because without Severus Snape, you would have died at the age of ten, your blood curdling and your body necrotising from the Hydra Poison as your parents scream outside the magi–operating theatre, Draco Malfoy’s Stasis Charm pointlessly holding you in suspension for a counteragent that would not have been created. You would have died at the age of eleven, under the thrashing branches of the Whomping Willow, your neck snapped and your life ebbing away, horribly aware of every second that slipped away. You would have died at the age of twelve, submerged deep below the surface of the frozen lake, the chilled water filling your lungs. You would have died at the age of thirteen, the Mors Essentiae sapping away at your very soul, stripping you of hope and joy leaving only despair and torment in its place, weakening and fading and becoming a husk in your own empty shell of a body, with no hope of an impossible cure. You would have died at the age of fifteen to Severus Snape’s cutting curse, then again that very same day to Bane’s blade through your heart, broken and battered and bleeding out on the cold stone altar in the Forbidden Forest, a wound in time finally being sutured.
(Maybe you were supposed to. Maybe you weren’t meant to survive that first time. What if that’s why you kept dying? What if that was the universe’s way of telling you that you were supposed to stay dead –)
But more than that:
The smartest, bravest man you have ever known – a man who has been more of a father to you than your own has, a man who has saved your life, time and time and time again – will be gone forever.
And that – that is unacceptable.
You slip your trembling fingers under the bloody, shredded collar around his torn throat, and there you feel it, the weak thready pulse of a man about to die.
You don’t understand. He survives, you know he survives. He’s been there your entire life, he lived. Harry defeats Voldemort and returns after the Battle and finds Severus Snape clinging to life, everyone knows that – it’s in all the history books, it’s what Harry said happened in all those post–War interviews he gave, it’s what’s taught in the History of Magic classes at Hogwarts.
But these wounds – how can anyone survive these wounds? He can’t die, this isn’t how it happened, this isn’t how it happened –
“You lived,” you choke, touching a shaking hand to Severus’s ice-cold cheek, his skin as white as marble. “I don’t understand. You survived. I know you survived. Severus. Severus, wake up – please –”
His breath rattles in his chest. His eyes flutter. His lips move.
He whispers your name.
Then Severus Snape breathes his last, and –