Master & Wolf

DH revealed Severus and Remus as amazingly scarred individuals.  It's here that we get a proper sense of how deeply Lupin's condition affected his life, that he was never truly able to go beyond it in so many ways and look at it in the same light as James, as his "furry little problem."  It was this immense shadow over all of his life, while Severus lived over the last decade and a half blaming himself for Lily's death.

Having wished himself dead and gone on living so that Lily's death will not have been in vain, with the final battle unfinished, does he "go on"?  It's an interesting question.

There are a lot of interesting answers in "The Prince's Tale."  I keep on going back to it and re-reading for clarification on all sorts of points.

That Severus loved Lily was a fantastic revelation, and quite wonderful.  I'm hoping that it's not reduced or simplified within the fandom, because there is so much more than being "in love."  [My Master & Wolf side rebels against this notion with some force, largely because it can, I think: it's very opportunistic.  To me one-sided Severus/Lily paints an already dark ship darker.  He needn't have been in love with her at all, but merely have loved her.  (I say "merely.")]

The Severus-Lily relationship strikes me primarily as a very intense friendship.  It's something born of a feeling of loneliness, something that plagued Snape for much, if not all, of his life.  Lily was a friend and had within her a level of caring and devotion that he'd not gotten from anywhere or anyone else.  She was safe and he was able to reflect those same sentiments back onto her.  He could show her himself properly, with all those little pieces of good that Dumbledore saw out there completely for her.

There's a very strong attachment that comes out of that and a very strong protective instinct.  There's a level of emotional intimacy that's almost lover-like,  a sense of having an imaginary friend - someone who seems constant - along with this older sibling-like protective instinct and a child-like sense of ownership.

She was his best friend and he never forgot about her, even when he was a Death Eater and she'd married one of his childhood tormentors, because he'd let her down first, calling her a mudblood.

Of course he'd do anything for her, and, of course, he did.