I wrote this a year ago on my old Tumblr, and decided to toss it up here because I think it's rather good.

AU in which everything is the same, except the prophecy told of a girl, and Lily and James Potter had a daughter instead of a son. Third-person POV: Severus Snape. Inspired by a jomespotter Tumblr post that I can no longer find (eep! the gist is that if Harry had been a girl who reminded Snape more of Lily, Snape would have treated her more like Littlefinger does Sansa in GOT). Cover art by andrahilde.

Fair warning: If you like Snape, you're not gonna like this, probably. Even if you don't like Snape, this is pretty disturbing, as is its intention.

SINFUL

She thinks him a coward.

Just like her mother did.

She's eleven years old by the time he gets his first real look at her, and he swears his heart has stopped. Because that's Lily Evans in the midst of another crowd of first-years, that's Lily Evans making her way up the Great Hall towards him…

She has her father's skin, smooth and shaded like a roasted peanut. She has his hair, flyaway and jet-black, fringed across her lightning-scarred forehead. She even has his specs, the lenses flashing as the candlelight catches them. But her face… She is Lily.

Arched eyebrows, high cheekbones, nose turned up ever so slightly at the end. Thin lips twitched upwards at the left corner, elevated in a permanent smirk. Eyes — long-lashed and dazzling, sharp and moss green and widening, widening as they take in all that surrounds them, this new world, this secret, magical world that she never would have known had it not been for him, if he'd never shown her… Minerva signed the letters, but it had been he who'd shown her what she was capable of.

He shakes his head to clear it. The girl — this girl, the one in front of him, who's caught his eye the way the castle has caught her own — isn't Lily. She is of Lily, that much is certain, but — and Snape's heart does a sickly lurch — she is Potter's, too.

Potter. That's what he'll have to call her.

And he hates her instantly.

She is thirteen the first time he recognizes the look in her eyes.

She is watching the Chang girl saunter past, and she looks helpless, dazed, and almost walks into a wall. Weasley guffaws at her expense, Granger smiles gently and waves her wand to catch Potter's books before they hit the stone floor. But Potter hardly notices. Potter is still watching Chang, the way her father watched her mother, with that same slack-jawed stupidity, but it was the way he'd watched her mother, too…

Lily is dead. But her eyes are her daughter's, and once again they are filled with want for someone else.

His hatred shifts.

She is fifteen years old when he starts filling out detention slips with her name. He will oversee her punishments.

"Incorrigible, irresponsible," he repeats on and on and on. Minerva is eyeing him warily, so he's sure to add a few "She's as pigheaded as her father," etc., for good measure. His colleague's expression doesn't change, but what can she say? Potter is a nuisance, no matter her current circumstances; Minerva can't go over Snape's head when it's Snape's rules the girl has been breaking.

Indeed she has grown into James Potter's shoes — straight-backed and proud, can't hold her tongue, strutting about like a peacock on the watch for anyone with the audacity to do anything less than admire her… She is wounded by the Prophet, the Ministry, the rumors that she's gone mad. The Wizarding world is split and the odds are no longer in her favor. She masks her vulnerability with arrogance.

Or is it confidence, a thick skin? It's so very Lily, the way she stares down her opposition, her flippant remarks, her chin held high, and the only miniscule crack in her resolve is that permanent smirk, now scowling a little more each day. That's the Lily in her; he remembers well.

He keeps her late in the dungeons to practice Occlumency. She's complete shit at it, so he has an excuse to keep her as late as he likes.

Her hair is piled atop her head, the way her mother used to wear it. The feeble candlelight plays upon the knot, her fringe, the wayward strands, and he swears he spots streaks of red, bleeding into the black, melting Lily and Potter together… Her specs flash and so do her eyes… Her upper lip is coated in sweat and she grits her teeth the way her father used to, in tireless frustration, anger…

"Try harder," he snaps at her.

Go to hell, her eyes tell him.

Once she burns him, accidentally. Or so she says.

Lily had done that once, too, in sixth year. One of his mates had muttered "Mudblood" as she passed them, and a casual flick of her wand had singed them all. She'd given a shrug and an "Oops" and had been on her way.

Sixth year, when Lily started wearing red lipstick. He'd seen it when she shot them that faux-apologetic little smile. He'd zoned in on it, that bright red smirk, several shades brighter than her hair… Dark red running through a mess of black tresses… A mouth like her mother's, bright and red and smirking, scowling, swearing at him between breaths…

His insides constrict.

She is lithe. Willowy, sylphlike. He can't decide which of the same word suits her best. She walks as though on water.

Her uniform skirt swirls about her thighs. Legs like caramel. Arms like toast, fingers like butterscotch. Lips like the blood spilled in her name. Eyes like the curse that took her mother.

Black, he knows, is always staring daggers at him, and would likely thrust a dagger into his heart if he had half a chance. That filthy vagrant is, after all, still James Potter's right-hand man, his sidekick, lapdog. He gives his surrogate daughter one of those two-way mirrors, Snape knows as he uses his own Legilimency skills outside of his lessons with Potter (she's never the wiser). Black tells her to give him a call if Snape gives her any trouble.

But what does Black know?

Because Potter won't know to tell him that the top two buttons of her blouse are always undone. She won't know that her mother used to wear hers like that, too, and that Black might remember because her father talked of it so often.

She won't know to tell him that she knocks her knees together instead of crossing her legs, or that she often clasps one hand between them so she won't drum her free fingers mindlessly upon the tabletop while taking notes. Her father used to drum his fingers like that — loudly, irritatingly, without any regard to anyone else's concentration. By mid-term sixth year, Lily had taken to stilling his dancing fingers with her own hand.

She won't know to tell him that she sucks in a breath of concentration while measuring ingredients exactly, a breath so like her mother's when she would run off with Potter to some abandoned classroom or corridor, when his hand would slide up her skirt and his teeth took her neck.

She won't know to tell him about the Potions master's hateful gaze, because Black already knows how deep the loathing runs. But she — she won't know what hatred is. Not like this.

He will mock her, set her up and knock her down. He will spit on her father's ghost and she will be at his mercy.

Lily is dead. He took one wrong step — two? Three? — and it killed her, obliterated, blacked out her enchanting, divine existence. She'd gone the same way as her filthy, blood traitor husband, too stupid, mindless, selfish to defend his family… And he'd had the audacity to love her?

Potter was nothing. Worthless. But his daughter is Lily's. Lily.

He sees it in the way she walks — down corridors, up flights of stairs, jumping the trick one with deft, grace, hardly a second thought. Her steps are measured, long, quick, she swings her body around corners in one smooth motion, with nary a pause or so much as the shadow of a trip.

She crouches to tie the laces of her right-foot trainer. Her spine curves forward, her sweater hitches up; there are freckles sprinkled like stars across her lower back.

COWARD.

COWARD.

COWARD.

She is sixteen when she flings the accusation at him, striking his skin with words that sizzle and burn and bleed. It's the word her mother never said, but felt — he knew she'd felt it, she'd made him feel it, too, every time she turned her disdainful gaze upon him: Coward.

What right did she have? This girl, this spawn of James bleeding Potter, this spark of past deeds and devils that haunted him — who was she to brand him coward and damn him? She, the righteous, almighty, the Chosen One… He saves her sorry, worthless skin, time and time again, and she curses him with words and wand?

James Potter, you would be proud.

He wants to grip her dirt-brown neck. She is nothing.

Her eyes flash like her mother's did, when she'd looked at him during the closing years of her life — hatred, pure and unadulterated. Where before there had been disdain, disbelief… Well, she could believe it now, couldn't she? He was a coward, coward, coward…

She is Lily and he has been dying for her, and she'd kill him if she ever got the chance.