Expecto Patronum

Yes, I know, I know, I know. I have an obsession with the Silver Doe chapter. And I even don’t know how to draw a doe (seriously.I.hate.drawing.does)

This is an entry for the “Tribute to the fandom” challenge on (deadline: Jan 9): spinners--end.deviantart.com/j….

And my personal tribute to perverse-idyll for her Snarry fic ” The White Road”: www.fanfiction.net/s/7404358/1… or perverse-idyll.livejournal.com… , for giving me food for thoughts, in her striking stories, with her insight on canon and fanon.

I’ve been wanting to illustrate this particular moment since I read it. It is what I love in literature and in the fandom: a few words, a few lines can make you visualize something powerful so strongly, that you just want to tame and capture in a definitive image (and never can…).


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<sub>"Expecto Patronum."

The doe forms shimmering at the end of his wand, and the lake turns molten silver. This is dangerous. Snape seems driven by something he can't control, now that it's only himself at stake.

Brilliant and unearthly, the Patronus soars into the air and twists back on itself, touching down again directly in front of him.

Snape holds utterly still, bathed in the luminous magic of remembered happiness.

Lily wonders how it feels; if it's like immersing one's existence in a gigantic pensieve. He doesn't turn silver like the overhanging cypress. If anything, his contrasts grow more pronounced, his hair and clothes a deeper black, the pallor of his skin so pure, so identifiably him in shape and angle, that it's like a spiritual portrait. His eyes are dense, hot, the air in front of them warped as if by a heat mirage. Shafts of light strike their black surfaces and refract below. When he blinks, colours fly out in minuscule, vanishing sparks.

The glow dims, condenses, and Snape darkens into near-silhouette, his face eerie with reflected magic. His eyes squeeze shut, and Lily's alarmed that Severus Snape - spy, Dark wizard, Death Eater, tongue-lasher of negligent fools - would drop his guard so completely. The doe arches her neck. She's like the scratch of light from a shooting star, caught in recognizable shape. The outline of her muzzle brushes Snape's cheek. She licks twice, thrice, her tongue a passing glitter, like tinsel on his skin. His face tilts, as if raised for a kiss or a blessing.

She vanishes, like a candle flame snuffed out of existence.

Snape jerks, pulled out of memory and plunged back into winter. Darkness flows over him, the darkness of the present moment. He gathers himself. It's mesmerising, like watching the black and white shadows of two decades race over him, fast-forwarding from youth into age, from hope to despair. Lily sees him gather his anger, his stubbornness, his cold brilliance and remorse, his bitter devotion, sees him spin them around himself and pull the net tight. The lines eat into his face as he grows spidery again, fugitive, too subtle for even the Dark Lord to catch.

In “The White Road” by Perverse Idyll


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