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Watching the youngest students enter the castle for the first time always tended to give the teachers new eyes for the sprawling grounds and ancient stone towers. Severus Snape sat near his fireplace, feeling a heaviness only a step back from grief. The flames and the firewhisky in his hand both lent him their warmth, but he remained reclining stiffly, staring past the walls with hard black eyes. This place has ghosts, he wanted to tell the young ones. Savor the wonder, try to remember its taste.

Twenty-two years ago, Severus had been small and pale and had no idea how to make a friend, but Lily Evans drew him like a moth to a candle. It’s real for us, he’d said to her, by the river. She hung off his every word, eyes riveted to the blue buds in Severus’ hands as they unfurled into flower. His mother’s old copy of Hogwarts: A History was open on her lap. The full force of Lily’s attention and wonder was the sweetest thing Severus had ever experienced. He looked at the photograph of the castle, waves and trees moving silently in a long-ago wind, and knew even then that magic meant something different to Lily than it did to him.

Twenty years ago to the day, Severus and Lily had stepped off of the Hogwarts Express together. The castle had jutted out of the Scottish rock like a torch in the night. He remembered seeing it, over Lily’s head, a beacon floating over the black water of the lake. She had grabbed his hand, shouted his name in excitement, eyes shining. Severus had gripped hers back, a tight feeling in his chest like a breath held too long.

It was small moments like these when he had felt most distant from Lily. They’d boarded the boats, following the thick-bearded figure of Hagrid, and pushed off through the dark waves. Lily talked excitedly with a curly-haired girl she’d met bare moments before, glancing up at the castle every few moments with trepidation. Severus, sitting a little apart, stared up at it hungrily.

He knew its shape like the back of his hand. He’d traced its outline in his mother’s books over and over. There were the dim lamps of the owlery. Ravenclaw tower was the slender spire half-hidden by the astronomy tower’s open roof and wide balcony. That peaked roof was the only one large enough to be the Great Hall. Somewhere below them, the windows of the Slytherin common room looked out into the water. That room, with the arched window on the fifth floor, was the Charms classroom. His mother had shattered that window in her third year. She’d whispered that to him, stroking his hair after he’d broken his father’s shaving mirror. Her voice had been low, reassuring. He heard her unspoken words even now. Somewhere, far away, is a castle your father can’t enter. Somewhere there is a place where you can break glass and not be afraid.

After Lily had tentatively accepted that she was a witch, she and Severus had bonded over her books of muggle myths. Severus couldn’t believe the fantastical ideas muggles came up with when they didn’t know what was impossible. They would read aloud to each other, Severus with fascination, Lily with fresh eyes. She would picture herself as Circe, cursing princes, he would imagine climbing the Yggdrasil to another realm. As Severus shared his world with her, he learned the picture of Hogwarts that was sketched in Lily’s head, pieced together from hundreds of stories of gods, knights, wicked witches. Where Severus imagined a fortress, locked and warded, Lily imagined a gleaming castle in the sky, an impossible dream.

They both got their world apart. Lily took to magic like a thestral to air. Severus didn’t remember her ever losing the gleam of joy in magic being real that didn’t exist in the eyes of those who were raised immersed in it. Severus got to spend nine months of the year somewhere he could make mistakes, could seize his interests with a fanaticism that occasionally intimidated even Lily.

They grew apart. Lily got her ten years of magic. She found the cracks in the walls of the castle, the blood puritism that hated and rejected her. She’d still had more time without magic than with, when the world she’d wished for killed her.

Severus barricaded himself in with power, reveled in untouchability. He was so far above his father he was flying, his bastard father was nothing to him. Without magic, Severus would be nothing. Without magic, no one was anything. And then Severus learned what it was to be with magic, and nothing else.

Twenty years later, Severus tried to imagine the world, the wishes they both had made, through Lily’s young eyes. Two trick bargains with a witch, two choices to go to the fortress or gleaming castle. Two prices, higher than either had imagined. Two fragmented futures, leaving only one behind. Severus wasn’t sure, now, whose wonderful vision had broken first.

Lily’s boy had come into the Great Hall earlier that night, a slight figure in black, and Severus could almost see her standing at his shoulder. He couldn’t help but stare hard at the child, taking a glimpse of green eyes like a curse to the chest, finding her in his narrow shoulders, the angle of his eyebrows, his fine fingers.

Severus sat in his chair, and imagined that his fortress had become a mausoleum.