Snape's nightmare ended the moment that black cat leapt out.
He thought perhaps he was simply too tired. Otherwise, why would he see a black cat identical to his adopted son?
That statue still stood on the third floor of Hogwarts. Any wizard who had walked through Hogwarts could recognize who it was.
"The master of dreams and mist, the bridge between life and death, the symbol of eternal good fortune—"
Snape thought of those absurd rumors. He thought of those foolish young wizards.
They spent every night roaming the castle for such vague, illusory things, creating no small amount of work for him.
At the busiest times, he could catch more than a dozen students wandering the castle at once.
He had uncovered an entire nighttime-roaming gang.
Thinking of this, a trace of mockery curled at the corner of his mouth.
"Good evening, Mr. Snape."
The black cat spoke. Its voice was familiar and young.
The curve of Snape's mouth immediately flattened. He stared seriously at the black cat.
Its tone seemed covered in a layer of mist, making it hard to hear clearly. It was as though all the voices he had ever heard were mixed together, making it impossible to tell which familiar person was speaking.
"Sean Green."
His voice carried a deep note of authority.
The black cat buried its head in a patch of mist, pretending it had heard nothing.
Faced with the completely unresponsive black cat, Snape did not press further. Instead, he carefully examined the scene around him.
They were in a vast white place. The thing most abundant here was dense mist.
It did not resemble ordinary fog, but something not yet fully formed.
With only a moment of thought, Snape knew where he was.
"The legends—are true—"
Then his gaze toward the black cat changed again and again.
"Good evening—Lord Deity."
Snape's body trembled slightly as he spoke in a hoarse voice.
"You were having a nightmare?"
the black cat said, its tail motionless.
Snape lowered his head slightly, and his already sharp gaze gained an indescribable darkness.
He had indeed been having a nightmare.
But in the past, such things would never have stirred his heart.
These insignificant matters. These things he had once dismissed with contempt.
It was only a few people dying in a disaster.
Had he seen too few disasters?
But over the years, he had clearly changed.
Who had the dead been?
Someone's father?
Someone's child?
He thought of his adopted son, far away at Hogwarts.
Thoughts he did not understand gradually surged into his heart.
In the past, he had never considered things from this angle—never thought that someone might care about another person and wait for them to return.
He had been someone with nothing. How could you force a man who had never seen the sun to long for sunlight?
"Gods—"
He knew this might only be some powerful magical creature.
"are this idle?"
The black cat did not speak. Mist always floated around its head, and Snape could not see its expression clearly. Though observing emotion on a cat's face was not realistic to begin with.
Suddenly, it leapt down from the mist.
Snape's body trembled slightly. He saw the black cat head in a certain direction, soon about to disappear into the white mist.
Thinking of a certain possibility, Snape followed it without much hesitation.
He kept observing their surroundings and did not notice that, behind the beige mist, the black cat was also observing him.
Longing, cowardice, wanting to see her yet wanting to retreat—
The black cat could see strands of mist winding around Snape. Without anyone teaching it, it understood what that mist meant.
If it looked long enough, it could even read a wizard's thoughts from the mist.
Was this what Madam Hufflepuff had said about seeing through a wizard's secrets?
The black cat felt slightly excited.
With this special magical ability, its plan was already more than halfway successful.
The man and the cat walked through a valley shaped by changing mist. The journey was calm.
Then, the mist rose.
Snape abruptly stopped. Within the rolling mist, he saw many ugly, unbearable scenes.
"Run, Professor Snape."
the black cat said.
It seemed to have said this more than once before.
"What?"
Snape did not quite understand.
"Run—everyone has something they know is meaningless, yet cannot give up. Dreams build bridges, and wizards can find those things they cannot abandon by traveling back and forth."
The black cat said things that Snape only half understood.
He gritted his teeth and watched the black mist rise like a towering wave.
"Go toward the place that calls to you, Professor Snape. You will find the direction. After all, this is the Borderland. Here, the call between heart and heart is louder than in any other realm."
The black cat gazed at the rolling mist.
It thought of that scene in Headmaster Dumbledore's memory.
"Madam Hufflepuff said that I am the storm."
A bolt of lightning split the black mist. Snape saw endless dark fog and thunder echoing through chaos.
He realized clearly that perhaps he truly had seen the so-called deity. Perhaps this truly was a long-lost beautiful dream.
"And then? What should I do?"
he roared.
"Keep moving forward. Unless absolutely necessary, do not retreat."
The black cat's whiskers trembled.
An unknown amount of time passed.
When Snape reached the far shore of that mist, everything around him had undergone a tremendous change.
The mist here was no longer the reddish-brown fog filled with anger and covering the sky.
It was no longer the ever-present, damp, cold gray mist that could burrow into the cracks between his bones.
The mist here was silver, light, like thin gauze soaked in moonlight, spreading layer upon layer beneath his feet.
There was no warmth, no wind, no breath of the living.
Only an endless, silent void, and in the distance, a faint light of unknown origin.
Snape glanced down at himself.
His black robes were undamaged. The wounds caused by the mist wrapping around and invading him as he advanced had vanished. There was no blood on his hands.
Am I dead? he thought.
In a dream?
When this thought surfaced, he felt neither fear nor relief.
Only a dry unwillingness.
But something was wrong.
He suddenly heard a sound in the distance.
He raised his head.
The mist was retreating.
That silvery white opened a path for him on its own.
The mist slowly curled to either side, revealing a straight corridor leading into the distance.
Light spilled from the end. It was a warm white that did not hurt the eyes, almost merciful.
He saw it.
At the end of the road, inside a wooden cottage, someone was sitting.
Red.
The first thing he saw was red.
That deep red was like a frozen flame, falling quietly over her shoulders.
Then came the outline—slender, familiar, rimmed softly by that layer of white light.
Her body was slightly turned toward him, as if she had just heard something and was about to turn back, but had not yet completed the movement.
Snape's body reacted before his mind did.
His steps stopped.
As if bound in place by an invisible rope, every motion froze dead in that instant.
Confusion.
Too much information flooded his mind at once, crashing together, clogging his throat, leaving him unable to move.
That flash of red struck some switch inside him. He heard something roar in his head.
Red hair.
Green eyes.
It really was her.
His lips moved, but no sound came out.
That name—the name he had repeated countless times in his heart yet never dared say aloud while awake—was like a burning coal stuck in his windpipe, unable to rise or sink.
He did not even realize whether he was breathing. Or rather, he could no longer breathe.
Then his mind exploded completely.
Ecstasy.
That joy was so violent, so overwhelming.
Like wildfire suddenly leaping from the ruins of memories that had been boiled down to ash.
It was her.
It really was her.
Not a portrait. Not a memory. Not those cursed green eyes on Harry Potter's face that reminded him of his sins day after day.
It was her.
She stood there. She stood in the light, leaving behind a quiet side profile that was almost about to turn around.
He wanted to rush forward.
Every muscle in his body screamed for him to rush forward.
He wanted to kneel before her, take her hand, and say the words he had steeped in cauldrons through countless long nights, washed with tears, yet never once truly managed to speak.
I'm sorry—
Forgive me—
I—
His foot took one step forward.
Only one step.
Then he saw it.
A flash of green.
He saw green flowers.
At the same time, he sharply noticed a dark stain on the hem of Lily's robe.
Was that blood?
He was not sure.
But suddenly, he understood.
He probably was not worthy.
Even though she seemed to be wandering here, waiting for something.
But would that something be him?
Someone who had killed her?
Though he had not personally acted, he was no different from someone who had killed her.
He had delivered the prophecy.
His informing had pushed her into the green light of Avada Kedavra.
His hands were clean, but his tongue was not.
He felt bitterness.
A real bitter taste rose in his throat, spreading from the root of his tongue through his entire mouth, like a whole bottle of expired Draught of Living Death.
He saw himself standing on the mountaintop, black robes flying, saying that ridiculous request—"Spare the woman."
He had thought that was love.
He had thought he understood love.
But at that time, he had only mistaken jealousy for proof of loyalty.
He did not know how to love.
He never had.
Not until he learned to gaze into the pair of eyes she had left behind.
Not until he understood how deeply she had once wanted to reach a conspiracy of shared will with him.
Yet only after her death did their roads finally intersect.
At this moment,
Snape's foot moved back.
Silently, almost instinctively, it retreated.
His body knew better than his mind that he was not worthy to walk forward.
There was no blood on his hands, but his soul was soaked with something that could not be washed away.
He could deliver intelligence to Dumbledore. He could stain his hands with blood as a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. He could use the second half of his life to atone for the first.
But some things could not be redeemed.
The bitterness did not spread for long.
Because thunderous roaring had already sounded far away. He knew his time was running out.
He greedily watched every movement she made.
This morning, the mist had thickened when she was brewing the second pot of tea.
Lily added a piece of pinewood to the hearth. The flames licked upward, crackling in tiny bursts, as if unseen little things were whispering inside the fire.
Calmly, she lifted the copper kettle. Boiling water poured into a coarse clay cup. Several dried rose petals were scalded into turning over, slowly releasing color.
It was a pink between an old dream and sunset light, blooming in the water and also in the air of this little wooden cottage.
The cottage was not large, yet it seemed no one had ever truly seen its boundaries.
On the wooden table by the window lay an open book. Its pages occasionally turned by themselves, as if an invisible reader were bending over it.
In the corner stood an empty chair. But if you stared at it long enough, you would feel that someone had once sat there, leaving behind the faint curve of warmth.
On the wall hung a round mirror. The surface of the mirror never reflected Lily's face. It only reflected the mist outside the window—and in the mirror, the mist was another color, as if it led to some other place.
Lily leaned by the window, her elbow on the sill, her chin in her palm.
The glass was covered in a layer of moisture. She drew a circle in it with her fingertip, and a thread of mist seeped in from that circle, cool and carrying the scent of moss and distant rain.
She did not shut the window. Instead, she pushed it a little wider.
The world outside was uncertain.
Tree shadows melted and formed again in the mist, occasionally revealing a branch. On that branch crouched an owl—or perhaps it was only a denser patch of fog?
A path extended faintly through the grass, its end swallowed by whiteness.
Only the statue of the black cat was certain.
Every wizard in the Borderland knew the story of the lucky black cat.
Lily was waiting.
Waiting for a cat.
The wind chime hanging above the door lintel moved, making a sound so faint it was barely there.
Lily did not turn her head.
She only poured some tea into the empty cup opposite her and pushed it to the other side of the table.
The fire burned low in the hearth.
Time here was a very soft thing, like freshly baked bread. It could be stretched very, very long, long enough that between one cup of tea and another, a leaf could fall from a branch to the ground and slowly be digested by the soil into the next spring.
Lily rested her chin on her folded arms, her eyes half closed.
She looked as if she were dozing, or as if she were listening to a song from far away.
Her lips trembled slightly. No sound came out, but if you moved very, very close—close enough to see the tiny drops of water clinging to her eyelashes—you would hear her humming a song without words, its melody like the mist outside the window: drifting and uncertain, yet everywhere.
It snowed in the Borderland.
The wooden cottage and Snape's hair were both dusted with snowflakes.
Everything in memory and reality seemed to overlap.
Inevitably, several hazy images surfaced in his mind.
It was a scene on the train.
"You'd better be in Slytherin."
He saw his young self say. Noticing that Lily looked a little happier, the young wizard felt encouraged.
"Slytherin?"
A boy sitting in the compartment turned his head when he heard the word.
"Who wants to be in Slytherin? I'd never want to stay there. What about you?"
James asked the boy sitting lazily across from him.
Sirius did not laugh.
"My whole family's been in Slytherin."
he said.
"Blimey,"
James said.
"And I thought you were all right!"
Sirius grinned.
"Maybe I'll break tradition. If you could choose, where would you go?"
James raised an invisible sword.
"Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart! Like my dad."
The young wizard gave a contemptuous snort. James turned to look at him.
"What? Got a problem?"
"No,"
the young wizard said, but his arrogant sneer showed the opposite.
"If you'd rather be brawny than brainy—"
"Then where do you hope to go? From the looks of you, you're neither."
Sirius suddenly cut in.
James laughed loudly.
Lily straightened, her face flushing red. She looked at James in disgust, then at Sirius.
"Come on, Severus. Let's find another compartment."
Snape felt his vision must have blurred.
In those moments, he should have realized they were walking the same road.
Even in the end, the only one who had strayed was him.
The white mist churned too fiercely.
Snape realized it was time for him to leave.
He gazed at her from afar.
Snow built up on his head layer after layer.
When he heard the snow falling, he remembered that back then, a happy fate had presented him with a flower called rose, and its brilliant red color.
From that moment on, a part of him would no longer remain in the darkness.
"What I am doing now is the best, the very best thing in my wretched life. What I will receive is the most peaceful, the very most peaceful rest in my ugly life."
He turned his head, and the dream woke.
Tonight,
mist rises everywhere, and I love you where no one can see.
The Borderland.
The wind chime rang again.
Inside the wooden cottage,
the tea was still warm, the chair was empty, and the fire burned bright.
Everything was just right.
Except for the absence of a certain coward.