Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following short sketch is set in 1976 in an alternate universe in which (some years earlier) seven year old Lily Evans had a series of dreams about 'the future', which she's never been able to forget. Since when, she's been trying to change things, with not much success thus far. (For the sake of the scenario, I've assumed that for one reason or another - whether fear of being thought crazy, or of being mistaken for some sort of 'seer' - that she hasn't ever actually told anyone who matters (and who believed her at the time) that she's had 'dreams about a future' where the things she dreamt about keep happening.) This story is for now a one-shot.

Slang: 'Sprog' is used as slang for a young child or baby.

Rating: This story is rated 'M', just to be on the safe side in case it ever amounts to more than a one-shot.

Further Note: (12th August, 2016) Due to a point made by one reviewer, which I found interesting, I have now expanded this piece to a two-parter; but I really need to get back to polishing up the next instalment of my Saint Potter universe centaur piece, chapter 4 of 'The Politics of Men and Beasts'.

It was an overcast day, in a Cokeworth park, in the summer of 1976.

Two teenagers – a boy and a girl – are sitting on some swings, next to one another. The girl is Lily Evans, pondering things, and trying to work up the determination to say what needs to be said.

The boy is an old friend – almost a former friend – and speaks first.

"I'm sorry about what happened by the Lake, after the Defence OWL. I should have said thank you."

"Yeah, well, it's not like you called me a mudblood or anything, and we were all under a lot of strain what with the exams and everything." Lily replies.

She knows of course – something which haunts her darker dreams and nightmares – that he was apparently destined to use that very word though. Or at least the plural form of it: Mudbloods.

Ever since the eve of her seventh birthday, when she dreamt of a future, Lily Evans has been trying desperately to avert that future from coming to pass. From the perspective of first a child, and then of a teenager, it seemed a future so messy and utterly, utterly, futile and pointless. It was a future which featured her dying beneath the wand of a maniac, in the hope of delaying for a rescue that was never realistically going to come for herself and a child that she'd borne to an egocentric prat that she'd spent most of her school-days loathing the guts of yet somehow still ended up getting married to – and all of that by a time less than a year past her twenty-first birthday.

Blow that for a game of soldiers.

Or at least that had been the idea,

But so far, everything she'd tried, from trying to make things different with Petunia, to her efforts to change Severus' home life, and the attempt to persuade the Sorting Hat to put her in Slytherin (the last had been a catastrophic failure, at the memory of which Lily still occasionally cringed) had still resulted in everything going pretty much the same as in the original timeline. She'd never completely given up hope of avoiding the sprog (however cute the sprog itself might have mostly been) with James Potter and the fearful and nasty end at the wand of a mass murderer – but she'd been becoming increasingly resigned to it, until that small difference that day by the lake, after the OWL exam.

Even trying to avoid destiny as she was, she wasn't sure if she could have ever forgiven Severus if he'd said those fatal words, 'mudbloods like her', but somehow, between raging at the idiocies of the 'Marauders' and an air of perfectly aloof concern for proper school discipline and fairness, she'd kept him from saying them, and now she wasn't sure what happened next.

There seemed to be a small window – she wasn't sure if it was a trick or not – to avoid the 'fate' she'd seen in her dreams, all those years ago.

"I might have." Severus mumbled, an expression of dark torment on his face. "Used that horrible bad word. I was at the end of my tether that day, and it gets thrown around so much in Slytherin. You get used to it, and it slowly creeps into your consciousness. There are a lot of people in Slytherin who don't like what I do have to do with you, and there are so many eyes always watching, and tongues always wagging around Hogwarts, that it's so difficult to know when or if it's safe to say anything about it to you. It's only here, away from all that, that I feel that I can actually say what's going on; what it's like. And these are powerful people, some of them, or at least the children of powerful people."

Huh. She'd never really thought about what Severus might be having to live with, day after day, week-in, week-out, like that.

"We'll have to think of something to do about that." Lily said firmly. "At least, that is, if you want us to do so? You're going to have to choose a side at some point, Severus, they won't stand for anything else. Theirs or mine?"

Severus gulped.

"Yours. Only, ever, always yours. But it's so hard."

They sat there, swinging in silence, apart from the squeak of the chains, for a while, then Severus abruptly got off his and stood up, glanced furtively around, and then spread his arms.

"There's something I want to show you, Lily. Something I've been working on, as a surprise for you. Something based on something you did that day that I first spoke to you."

And he flexed his fingers, and then took off to hover, about a foot off the ground. He held himself there, for about ten seconds, before he came down gently back to land. And he'd done it without a wand.

"What? Is there some controlled levitation potion you've been working on?" Lily questioned, amazed by this.

"No wands. No potions. No broomsticks or other items. Just pure magic." Severus said. "Inspired by you, and the way you floated off the swing that day."

"That was accidental magic, Sev. That's the sort of thing you do as a one-off, without thinking, as a child, but can't ever do again afterwards. Witches and wizards can't fly without a spell or potion or… or… 'something'."

"We can, and I've worked out a way to do it." Severus said, his face now lit up with pride. "Inspired by you. It's my greatest invention, to date. It's what I've been working towards with levicorpus, and everything else like that, except only I know about this, and now you. I'm still ironing out some minor problems, but I can try to teach you, if you'd like. Obviously somewhere that nobody – magical or muggle – can see."

"That's… that's incredible. And yes please, Sev." she said, her face lit up with the enthusiasm which she felt. Severus' fate as a Death Eater must still be possible to put off, if he could invent something like this, and then trust and like her enough to share it first and exclusively with her.

Author Notes:

So: the first real difference that Lily has noticed from the 'future' she dreamt of (in which her role is assumed to have been and to have played out exactly as in the canon universe) is that due to years of efforts that she has been making the scene after the Defence OWL by the lake played slightly differently from what she was expecting, just at the point that she was about to give up on trying to save Severus (from becoming a Death Eater and going off to join Lord Voldemort, which she's fairly certain he must have done in the 'future' she dreamt about) or even to trying to stay friends with him. After that, she didn't really want to speak with him at Hogwarts, about things, but wanted a private - well away from any other witches or wizards or friends - word with him about their friendship, back in Cokeworth.

Lily hasn't quite grasped (yet) how Severus sees her, or what he feels about her.

I've assumed that as a child (and then an early teenager) Lily hasn't quite the same view of (or ability to understand) how her adult self would have viewed James (or for that matter, Harry). Mind you; she's been getting closer to the mindset – especially as hormones, and various social pressures and lessons kick in.

It's not made clear (or at least not to my mind) in canon, where Lord Voldemort or Severus Snape learned to fly without broomsticks or the like. Canon Harry sees Voldemort flying months in such a fashion before canon Harry sees canon Severus flying and as far as I can see just assumes that it's a trick that Lord Voldemort taught to Severus. However, canon Lord Voldemort seems to me precisely not the sort of person to share unique or rare magical secrets with anyone – he apparently doesn't even tell his most loyal and trusted Death Eaters (such as Bellatrix) who are their guardians just what his horcruxes really are – and it seems to me at least as plausible that Severus invented (or discovered in some old tome) how to fly without a broomstick, and showed it off to Lord Voldemort as part of his initiation into the Death Eaters; maybe it was even what got canon Severus (despite his poverty-stricken background, disgrace of a mother (who married a muggle!) and half-blood status) into the Inner Circle of the Death Eaters at such an early age? At the time of these notes, I know of nothing in canon (or said post-canon by J.K. Rowling) which would contradict the theory that Severus is the one who invented/'discovered' flying without a broomstick, and it's an idea I certainly intend to reuse/run with in other stories...

This piece is a one-shot. It could split off into a universe (if Lily notices that Severus actually likes her quite a lot, and she chooses him, over James) which goes in a different direction from canon, but I am sufficiently busy with other sufficiently many other ongoing pieces at the time of these notes that I don't have the resources to try to flesh such thoughts out and to take them much further.

NB

Now expanded to a to a two-parter as of 12th August, 2016. Severus was a bit slow and – beyond his initial reaction to Lily in this chapter – needed some time to think some things through, thoroughly.