A/N

Perhaps a little foreword, so that you can know what to expect.

I am a writer who is big on the psychology and sociology of multiple characters - their development with respect to themselves (psychology) and with respect to the people they interact with (sociology). I don't believe in bashing, I believe in reasoned criticism plausibly delivered within the story, that serves as one of the tools to further character development. Taking that into account, I'll try to be as candid as possible about the positive and negative qualities of every character, be they Severus, Lily, the Marauders, or secondaries. I will also attempt not to be blatantly pro or anti any faction, with the primary focus being on Lily and Severus, though the Marauders will come a bit more prominently into focus as the story moves further in. Romance will play a big part in the back half of the story, but will not be the sole dominant genre, as I am interested in a variety of interactions, not just romantic ones, and while the centerpieces of the story (as should be obvious by the end of this prologue) will be Severus and Lily from the beginning to the end, I aim for it to be something of an ensemble story expanding well beyond this twosome, especially once the timeline reaches the height of the First Wizarding War. The potential is there in canon, and the relative obscurity of the period allows for plenty of room for storytelling, which I plan to put to good use.

The story will be divided into a number of 'Parts' - you can think of these parts as relatively self-contained stories within the larger narrative (like individual stories in a series, except I chose to have them all together as one story), therefore while it's necessary to read them in order for proper understanding, for those who feel enormous fanfics are hard to digest, taking breaks between reading each part shouldn't affect the understanding of the narrative.

So, without further ado...

Prologue: When Girl Met Boy

Lily Evans met Severus Snape when she was nine years old.

He had been a sallow, stringy thing even then, dressed in mismatched, tattered clothes: jeans that were too short and coat that was too large, with a strange smock-like shirt under it. His hair had been too long and his nose had been hooked; the thing that had drawn her the most, even then, had been his eyes – blacker than night, blacker than coal, blacker even than an abyss, yet with just a trace of the iris' outline, darker still in the very middle, so that they held a sense of endless depth, rather than a flat surface.

Her first thought had been that he was a rude boy; the first thing he'd said to her was that she was a witch (she understood later that he wasn't actually being rude, just that she'd misunderstood). He had looked silly in that big coat of his, with his cheeks splotched red and his voice high-pitched.

Petunia had been rude to him; he had been rude to her right back, and Lily had followed her big sister's lead, because Tuney always knew best. But that night, she'd remained awake in her bed, listening to her sister's light snores, and had thought of how the boy had said that she was a witch, and that he was a wizard, and that his mum was a witch, and she'd thought of wishing to fly so badly it hurt inside, of letting go of the swing and feeling like she could stay in the air forever, of how Tuney had complained so shrilly and had demanded that she stop when the flower had danced on her palm.

And the next day, when she'd seen the strange Snape boy again in the park, in those same clothes, with that same strange expression on his face, she'd snuck away from Tuney and gone to up to him, said 'Hi, I'm Lily, what's your name?' and he'd said, muttered, really, 'I'm Severus', with his cheeks as splotched red as they'd been the day before.

She would never forget his face when she'd asked him to tell her what witches and wizards were, and why he thought she was one of them, that shocking mix of elation and happiness and covetousness and fear (though it would take her years to parse out every little thing from that memory, until she would be sure that she understood it fully).

And her life had become that much more interesting because of her new acquaintance.

Lily Evans was ten years old the first time she thought that Severus Snape wasn't altogether too ugly, some of the time.

He'd been telling her about Hogwarts and wands and the Ministry, and she'd asked him, begged him in her own mind, to tell her that he wasn't taking the mickey with all his stories (the way Tuney had gotten to insisting whenever Lily so much as mentioned Sev), to tell her that it was all real ('It is real, isn't it?' she'd asked). He'd been cross-legged in front of her, with his coat off and his oddly cut hair (he'd told her that his mother hadn't seen well enough to cut it properly, but Lily had had a thought that maybe something had interrupted the haircut) for once not hanging over his face, leaning back with his palms planted on the green grass and a confident little smile emerging in the corners of his mouth ('Definitely', he'd said), and she'd had a stray thought that self-assurance really suited him so much better than embarrassment.

And then he'd told her that it didn't make any difference that she was Muggle-born, and she'd been too young, too enchanted with the idea of magic and Hogwarts and wands and owls, too absorbed in her own luck to notice his hesitation, to notice the way he'd watched her, even then. She'd been too deaf to hear the lie in his voice, and too blind to see the greed in his eyes, too sheltered to understand what it might mean, and even if she had not been, if she had heard the lie for what it was, and had seen the greed for what it represented, and had had the experience to give it meaning, she would still have been too happy that she could share this with someone, anyone, too happy that there was another who wished to spend so much time with her explaining things that must have been so obvious and normal to him, to care.

Then he'd made the branch hit Tuney over the shoulder and Lily had gotten angry with him, and the moment had vanished like so much smoke, so that she'd not think to return to it until many years in the future, when she would question everything and anything, and wonder what might have been, had she known then his true nature.

Severus Snape saw Lily Evans when he was nine years old.

She had been the prettiest thing he'd ever seen in his short life, with her rich red hair and her blazing green eyes and her rosy lips. He'd thought her the prettiest thing in the world even before he'd seen her trying to fly off the swing and succeeding. Then he'd thought her the only thing in the world he wished for.

He'd hated her horse-faced sister, for being the one who got to talk to her and play with her and listen to her and be known to her. He'd hated the older girl even more when she'd ruined his first attempt at gaining that attention for himself, and more still for trying to stop Lily from being his friend. He might have hated her the most that day after he'd gotten so very angry and embarrassed with himself ('What is that you're wearing, anyway?' she'd said. 'Your mum's blouse?') that he'd snapped and the branch had snapped with him, and Lily had left him in the park because he'd told her that he wasn't the one to do it, even when he was.

He'd not understood then, and it would take him years to understand, that what he'd thought and felt in that moment hadn't been a healthy thing, hadn't been something most others would consider appropriate. He'd not understood that Lily would see though his words, and that she would not understand him either. How could she have, when they'd been ten years old and he'd not understood himself?

He'd been so happy that Petunia would no longer be in the way, that day on the Hogwarts Express, that he'd not given a thought to what Lily had been feeling because her big sister had called her a freak. He'd had no siblings, and perhaps, if he had, he might have been more considerate; he would doubt that in the years to come, because he'd been a boy who'd never had what he'd wanted, and he'd wanted Lily so badly it had hurt, deep inside, had wanted her with a singular focus that had excluded everything else, including her feelings, so that she'd become, in the two years of their friendship, a paragon of perfection, untouchable, unreachable, and, ultimately, not really just an eleven-year-old girl who'd been hurting because a person precious to her had scorned her. He would find himself wishing that he'd been a different boy back then, so that he might have taken her hand and hugged her and promised that he'd find a way to fix it for her, instead of ignoring it and telling her that she better be in Slytherin.

Then the damned Marauders had come into his life and Lily had been sorted into Gryffindor when he'd gone to Slytherin, and the world had become too large and demanding to let him have what he'd so badly wished for.

Severus Snape was almost fourteen years old the first time he knew that Lily Evans might not choose him, if she were forced to make a choice.

It had been near the Christmas hols, and he'd managed to accidentally embarrass Peter Pettigrew in their Transfigurations class ('Even second-years should know that spell,' and the stupid little git had proven him wrong not half a minute later), so the foursome had retaliated harshly enough to send him scurrying to the hospital wing and Madam Pomfrey's expert care. It had not been the first time that year, or even that month, that they'd found some way of attacking him, but they'd mostly kept to things he could reverse on his own before this.

Madam Pomfrey had been displeased; she'd had that pinched look on her face and had been curt and very annoyed while she'd searched for a way of transfiguring his nose back from the beak that sodding Potter had turned it to.

Lily had found him there and had almost interrogated him on what had happened; she'd been in a bad mood all day ('I'd really hoped that mine wouldn't be painful, but this is truly horrible; Tuney has it so lucky,' she'd complained to sixth-year Alice Ainsworth earlier that day while he'd walked behind her, unnoticed, so he'd concluded that she was in some physical discomfort), and had had little patience for his indignation about the event. She'd actually told him that he shouldn't have been so scathing of Pettigrew, and though she'd apologised the next day and assured him she knew he hadn't actually meant those words to be about Pettigrew, Severus had still lived through a sleepless night with the discomforting knowledge that Lily, who was his best friend, his only true friend in the world, really, had not seemed inclined to take his side in this, even when she knew about the way those Gryffindor boys persecuted him.

He'd gotten his revenge on Potter later that week, a tit-for-tat, a little Dark Transfiguration that had forced the Golden Boy Mr I'm-Unbeatable-In-Transfiguration Potter to spend the day in the infirmary. Lily had yelled at him, truly yelled at him, for it, and the disappointment in her eyes had burned through him until there had been nothing but bitterness in his stomach; her voice, though, her voice had held that same note of dismissal that his father's always did, the note that told him 'I don't care about your sodding problems, so don't you dare disgrace me like this again', and it had infuriated him, until the words had gotten glued together in his throat in their haste to come out, and he'd been angry enough to break something.

Watching Lily walk away from him that day, he'd had a thought that it wasn't bloody fair that she'd been angry with him for doing the same thing that bloody Potter had done, when she'd not reacted the same when Potter had been the one acting in that way.

Then a little voice in his mind, sounding very much like his disapproving mother, had whispered And why would that be? and the blood in his veins had frozen, because it had come to him that perhaps he wasn't good enough for her to choose him over Potter, were she placed in that position (years later, he would turn it over in his mind a thousand times, to make sure that he fully understood it as the inception of everything that was to come).

And his life would become guided by this thought, by the urge and need to prove to her that Potter wasn't as golden as everyone seemed to think he was, because maybe, just maybe, if she understood that, she'd choose Severus instead.

A/N: In case anyone's interested, this is a sort-of origin story to another series of mine, The Lion and The Snake, which focuses on Harry Potter timeline. It can be considered a standalone, and while it's not nearly close to being fully written, I'll try my best to keep it coming. I do have it at least roughly planned out, and the chapters should be long enough to tide over.

As with all my other stories, I'd be grateful for a britpicker, and as I have no beta, all mistakes are mine.