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Your news comes at 4:38 in the morning of November first. Amycus, your brother, brings it: “He’s dead, Al.”
You answered your floo in a dressing gown for your brother and pull its wide sleeve up now, crumbling the cotton in your fist to look at your Mark. It is inflamed, and red, but not black—the lines of the skull are faint beneath the swelling, as though you’ve got a nasty constellation of spider bites but nothing more sinister. Amycus pokes it with his wand.
“Ow,” you scold him, ever the elder sister to his tormenting younger brother.
“Sorry,” he says, reminding you that he’s grown now. “But you didn’t feel anything, did you? It should feel like him if he’s—if he’s there.”
“And then you’d have called him down to my kitchen to see my pyjamas, Amycus. Better think through that more.”
Amycus flushes, spots of red dazzling his unhappy face. “He’s gone, though. He’s really gone.”
Neither of you know who’s done it, only that it’s done. Amycus was out drinking with an unmarked friend and didn’t come to notice until late. You were asleep early after a dinner to mark the holiday. What lies unexamined is the set of people who might know more: the Malfoys, the old men, the Lestranges. You’re close to none of them. Your parents don’t know that you and Amycus joined up; you and he are your own island, isolated together in your deference to the Dark Lord.
You are the first to ask, “Should we wait for him?”
Carefully, Amycus repeats the assertions you’ve all heard. “He is beyond death.”
“But… if the Marks are gone… he might not be.”
“Do you think he’s truly dead, Alecto?”
Your younger brother is not so careless as to look hopeful. Even as siblings, you can’t afford that trust. What you see when you look at him, though, is startling—someone else vanquished the Dark Lord, but it is in your power to give him his freedom. You are the older sister, and you make the call: “I think that he must be.”
—
You try to avoid hope all the rest of that sorry morning, but its fingers pry into the cracks of your ignorance. Amycus opens a new bottle of whisky and you floo Selwyn, with whom you’re not close but he was the same year as you at school. He brings along Travers, and that makes it nearly a party as you drink and smoke together around your dining table, awaiting the morning Prophet.
“The Prophet will have news,” Travers argues. “If it’s that fucking Order what did it, then it’ll be that rat Malfoy running to tell them.” You all agree Malfoy’s going to have to put up a very public change of heart. “I don’t see that we won’t know today.”
Selwyn thinks it will be kept quiet for days longer. Amycus keeps them both occupied, playing each argument in turn to while away the hour, which you spend only half-listening and staring out your kitchen window for the first glimpse of that grey autumn dawn.
It is raining when the bird comes in, shaking his tawny feathers over your kitchen sink. You pay by subscription so it’s self-interest which makes him wait, jealous with your paper and wielding sharp beak and talons to hold on to his extra minute in the warm dry place. You’ve never had a way with owls. He scores one jagged rip in your sleeve as you snatch the damp paper from him, to the hoots and amusement of your guests.
The headline: THE BOY WHO LIVED!
Travers reads the article aloud, and all are too busy to see you at the moment that your world ends.
—
What hasn’t Lily Evans been to you?
She has been a stranger, without question. She was a mudblood witch.
She has been an acquaintance, the familiar jolt of hair redder than yours trailing Severus Snape through the old common room.
She was a friend when you got to know her, and a sweet young fling, and a sickening embarrassment thereafter. She once made you so angry that you had a row in Diagon Alley, cursing her name and her wretched, repulsive husband.
Then you fucked her again, and Lily Evans transcended definition.
It is wrong to say that you loved Lily Evans. Her family loved her. Snape, as a boy, so clearly loved her—he might still. Lily loved her son, and her son loved her back radiantly, as only a child can. Lily deserved love because she gave it so freely and so generously, not from obligation or insecurity but because she was so sure of herself that she knew the worth of her love. She loved you; you’re certain of it.
But she loved James, too, at least for a time, and he neglected it. She loved you and you couldn’t return it. She was not what you should have loved, not with your blood and your family and your Mark. If you loved Lily Evans, you betrayed those. If you loved Lily Evans, you betrayed her.
So you did not love Lily Evans—that was the only thing she never was for you.
—
They hold a memorial for the public in a little park on Diagon Alley. Its only green comes from shrubbery, as November eats the color from grey grass and trees and the listless sky turns the ornamental pond just as dull. The park has been filled now with flowers for the shrine at its center: a portrait of the family printed nearly life-size.
You attend along with every other witch and wizard in Britain. The crowd floods the park and the pavement and the street, part revelry and part reunion. Friends who haven’t talked in the past decade find ways to absolve themselves of their divides; there are martyrs and an orphan to mend past mistakes, and not a body mourns the Dark Lord. There is Malfoy, and wife and son, so conspicuous with their gift of white daylilies. There too is Yaxley, with under-minister Fudge, both looking eminently electable in their somber black coats.
You do not wear black. The black dress is home, on your duvet atop the mattress, discarded in a fit for being over-serious. Most attendees have chosen the moderate grey, aligning to no overt commitments. Albus Dumbledore stands out in sapphire studded with stars, McGonagall by his side in fierce tartan. But you could not wear black, because you are not—you are no one. Who was Lily Evans to you, Alecto Carrow? Ni ami ni amant. If ever she belonged to you, you never learned it.
So you could not wear black like the true mourners, the little knot of sad young faces arranging flowers around the portrait and being avoided by the mass. You wear green, the deepest forest green that you own, and make yourself the shade of Lily: you were always more auburn than red, more hazel than green, more wicked than clever. She looked so lovely in emerald, even if she wore it rarely; you choose a dim answer to that and drift through the spectacle of a world moving on from having her.
Your target is far from the center. He wouldn’t be welcome there, so he stands alone behind an iron fence, out on the pavement by the street. The crowd is much thinner here, restlessly moving as people join and leave the memorial.
“You can go in,” you tell Snape.
Pale and feckless, he sneers at you. “I know that.”
Did you choose his company because you wished for a fight? You aren’t sure, though the inevitability was clear. You’re no stranger to sneering and reply, “Then you are a coward, not merely stupid.”
“And what would you know of bravery,” he hisses, turning on you in a whirl of his (black) robes. “What more might you have done, Alecto? What cowardice of yours brought us here?”
“Mine!”
“Yours!” he shouts. The crowd doesn’t notice. You are beneath their notice. “Yours, because she—because you—she was your friend, too.”
Coldly, you say, “You don’t know what you’re accusing me of.” No one ever knew, not even at school, not even Snape.
“Then she was only your friend before?” Before Potter, he might mean, or before your Mark. His sourness remains on his unpleasant face—you’ve never seen him look otherwise—but the doubt creeps in as he begins to wonder. What was Lily to you? He saw your friendship when you were adolescent, nothing more.
“Pity,” he decides, resuming his vigil through the fence. “Lily was worth knowing.”
“I thought that you no longer talked.”
And here Snape laughs, hysterically high, for only a moment. It lets you look at him: lank hair, yellow skin, a fidgety malnourishment born of stress. He looks wrecked, not merely ugly. He looks how you want to feel.
“Whatever our other friendships, we are not friends, Alecto,” he reminds you, though he uses your given name. “I don’t owe you anything.”
This crooked, narrow man is the closest thing to Lily Evans that’s left in this world. He is an awful envoy for her—contemptible, graceless. But he knew her as a child, and
you find peace in admitting to him, “I loved her, but I can’t stand in there with her memory.” He doesn’t ask you why not. Your fingertips are turning pink with cold, a shock of life against your dead black nails, which you bring to grip Snape’s arm. He flinches, but not in pain; your touch is too light. “Someone must remember her.”
Snape unkindly says, “The entire world will remember her.”
You shake your head. “I think it must be us. I think that it must be me.”