699Chapter 20: Ch II,17: To Struggle for Clarity
Chapter 17: To Struggle for Clarity
"Remus, why is one of your classmates calling on the telephone?!" Hope Lupin's voice called distantly from the other end of the cottage, and Remus blinked in surprise, putting his book down.
"Who's calling?!" he yelled back, nonplussed.
"A Lily Evans!"
Scrambling off his bed at the speed of light, Remus almost stumbled his way through the house to the kitchen, where the phone had been hung on the wall last year. His mother, slender and with an old-world beauty to her face that stopped her from appearing in any way older than her forty years even though her sandy hair was liberally streaked with silver, looked at him in open curiosity even as she handed him the handset, and Remus grimaced slightly.
He'd completely forgotten to tell his mother about exchanging phone numbers with Lily in the wake of arriving home, and now he was berating himself for it, because part of the reason he'd forgotten had been because he'd not actually thought that Lily would call.
"Lily, hi," he said, pressing the handset to his ear tightly and finding that his heart was fluttering in his chest more than from simply running through the house.
"Hi, Remus! Did I call at a bad time?"
"No, no, I just... I'd, er, forgotten to tell my mum about you calling. It's not important," he answered her, shaking his head at his mother's amused look at the same time.
"Oh, good. How are you? How's your summer been going so far?"
"Fine. I'm... fine. Everything's... fine."
Turning his back on his mother, he banged his forehead lightly against the wall by the phone, wondering where his brains had gone and why his tongue was running unchecked. Seriously, fine? Was that the only word he could think of to describe the last week?
Unfortunately, given his mother's relative proximity in their tiny kitchen, it really was. In truth, things were anything but.
Exhausted by everything that had happened in the weeks preceding his arrival home, Remus had found himself in bed far more than out of it, feeling lethargic and sleepy until he'd found little point in getting up when he could read just as easily in bed. The added sleep had actually done him good in finally shaking off the residual aches and pains of the last transformation, if not in making him any less tired, and his appetite was still far from where his mother wished it to be, worried as she was given the rather more violent traces of the full moon than was usual.
His father had picked him up at the King's Cross, and had Apparated them with little fanfare to Wales, and though he'd pretended that everything was fine, Remus had noticed the way he'd almost flinched at the sight of Remus' healing wounds and new scars. The resulting scarcity of Lyall Lupin had been expected, but it had hurt Remus nonetheless. After all, he'd not seen his father since this time last year, and the man was undoubtedly doing his damnedest to avoid Remus as much as he could.
Remus' relationship with his father had always been tense, as far back as he could remember. Lyall was a good husband, and Remus' parents both loved each other and loved him unconditionally, but since Remus' earliest childhood – since his turning, really, but he had almost no memories of before then, so he chose not to notice this fact – there had been distance between them that Remus had not known how to breach, for the simple reason that he couldn't understand why it was there in the first place.
Perhaps he would have noticed it less if he'd not been as close to his mother growing up as he was. Hope, in spite of being a Muggle, had taken to the wizarding life like a duck to water when she'd met and married Lyall, and where her husband had pulled into himself after Remus had been turned, Hope had stepped up to fill the hole. Remus had no doubt that other kids would have found her actions annoying, would have thought her an overbearing parent, but he didn't. They'd been almost nomadic in his youth, before Hogwarts, having to move every few months as the neighbours became suspicious of the monthly noises, forcing Hope to give up her job and friends, just as much as Remus had been forced to remain a secluded shut-in. As a consequence, they'd grown from a simple parent and child to friends as well as Remus had grown up, and though it was different to an extent now, with Remus away at school for most of the year, Hope working properly again and both of them being much older, the bond between the mother and son had remained as strong as ever.
Which was primarily why he didn't want to let his mother know how depressed he was feeling about having his father acting in many of the same ways that Remus' former friends had been, after their big fight. He wanted to share all this with Lily – she was the only person he felt he could share it with in the first place – but he could hardly do so while standing in the same room as Hope. So, instead, he stuck to his 'fine' while Lily grilled him over it until she finally gave up.
"Anything from the guys?"
"Ah, no," he answered, aiming for nonchalant but failing miserably and achieving somewhere between pathetic and desperate. "Not that I was expecting it."
"God, what wankers," Lily muttered, and Remus had a stray thought that her expletive apparently shifted depending on her surroundings – she very rarely used 'God' at Hogwarts, having assimilated 'Merlin' with excellent expertise for a Muggle-born, yet that was all she'd used in this conversation. "If it makes you feel any better, my week hasn't been peachy, either."
"Oh? Does it have to do with Snape?"
"Surprisingly, no. Actually, I've not seen him since we came home. No, it's my mother. And Petunia. Well, and my father, too. Oh, I don't know, Remus. I feel like I've fallen through some sort of portal into a world where no one gets along properly in my house anymore, and I can't make heads nor tails of it."
"I'm sure you'll figure it out," Remus offered loyally.
"I'm going to have to, if I want things to go back to the way they were last year. If they even were different last year."
"Don't you remember?"
"That's the problem, Remus; I don't know if I'm remembering it right. I mean, I thought that everything was fine, but obviously now it's not, and after everything that's happened last month at Hogwarts, I'm starting to think that I've been blind to all the other stuff that was going wrong all around me, just like I was when it came to Severus."
"Maybe, but even if you were, you're not blind to it anymore," he pointed out, trying to be as pragmatic as he could. Given all the emotional upheavals in her life recently, he thought that maybe what she needed was an action plan to tackle the issues. After all, she'd herself said that she wanted to face them, not hide from them anymore. "That's a good place to start."
"You're right. Thanks, I think I needed a bit of support on this."
"Any time."
"Does that mean you'll actually phone me, or should I be the one to keep track of the schedule?" she asked, voice lilting in amusement.
"I'll phone you," he answered, suddenly itching to get off the line, uncomfortably aware that his mother was basically listening in on his side of the conversation. He couldn't add 'when I can properly talk', but he thought that Lily understood the implication behind his promise nonetheless.
"All right; if you don't catch me at home, just ring back later in the day, but I think I'll probably be hiding indoors until the stupid heatwave breaks. If I can't go swimming, it's not worth it to go outside at all, I swear."
"Sure. I'll talk to you later, then."
"Bye, Remus!"
They rang off, and when Remus replaced the handset and turned around, his mother was giving him a suspiciously knowing look.
"So, Lily, huh?"
He frowned, trying to parse out what she meant, and when it hit him, he felt his cheeks warming stupidly fast.
"Mum! No! No, no, you've got it all wrong. Lily's just a new friend, is all."
"Oh?"
Sighing, Remus dropped himself into the chair to rest his elbows on the tabletop and run his fingers distractedly through his hair.
"I haven't seen any owl post recently," Hope commented. "I'd have thought at least James would have written, he's usually quite punctual about your correspondence."
"Ma..." Remus sighed, finally turning up his eyes to meet hers. He had no idea what she saw on his face, but her teasing smile vanished almost immediately, to be replaced with a worried frown. Putting aside what she'd been doing, Hope moved to sit next to him.
"Cariad? What is it?"
"We... had a fight," he whispered, stumbling over his words, haunted by the memory of that night as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. "I'm not their friend anymore."
"Remus," his mother breathed out, and her warm fingers encircled his wrists. "What happened?"
The story came spilling out – not everything, not the worst of the bullying, not... he couldn't tell her, couldn't even stand the idea of her looking at him with disappointment in her eyes, so he modified it, said it was the usual pranking that slipped control, and even with that concession, he felt so ashamed of that day, of standing by and letting his friends act in that way, turning a blind eye to it, remembering Lily's berating words and judging eyes over it.
"They didn't even come to the hospital wing to visit, after..."
He hated the tears that were stinging his eyes again, as if he'd not cried enough over this stupid little detail, and it felt good to burrow into his mother's arms as if he was ten years old again and not sixteen, to take in her warmth and love and just breathe. He'd missed her so much in the last month, her presence and support and courage.
She prodded him to his feet and shifted them onto the couch in the sitting room, where she could properly lift her legs up and he could snuggle into her side and try to pretend that the world couldn't get him, that the bad things that existed out there weren't also inside of him, there to stay until the day he died.
"Tell me about Lily, then," his mother instructed, and that was a comfortable topic, a soothing topic, because the phone conversation had left a warm glow in his chest, that Lily had remembered him, had wanted to tell him her issues and hear his advice, had wanted to know what was going on with him enough that she'd asked him three times if he was sure he was fine.
"She's the girl I told you was top of our class in Charms. We study together a lot, and she's had some trouble with her best friend this semester too, so we, er, we talk about, uh..." He swallowed, giving up on that specific tangent and opening his mouth to describe how they'd become friends, but then it came to him that he couldn't tell her, because they'd become friends over Sirius almost using Remus to kill or maim or infect Snape, and he suddenly wanted to tear his hair out.
He had always told his mother pretty much everything; he'd never truly learned to shy away from telling her things that happened in his life, having never had friends before Hogwarts to teach him such thinking, and there had been practically nothing that he felt embarrassed saying until this year, mainly because his infrequent crushes on fellow classmates were always allowed to pass unremarked, and he'd read more than enough on the topic of sex to not need any advice from his parents anyway.
Yet in the space of half an hour, he'd lied to his mother once, in a big way, and now he was going to keep a secret from her too, just as large, and he felt sick to his stomach, a tiny, vindictive part of his mind whispering that this was other three Gryffindors' fault in the first place, because all of the topics he was agonising over were in one way or another tied to their indiscretions.
That vindictive part of him made him hate his former friends with a viciousness that terrified him, that smelled of damp fur and crazed instinct, that brought with it flashes of maddened rage and fear that accompanied a frenzied need to hunt, to hurt, to bleed the little rat and the late-arriving deer and most of all the betraying dog.
He pushed it away with as much mental force as he could; the wolf was not allowed to take over his emotions and conscious mind, not ever. There was nothing that Remus could do when it came to the subconscious mind during the full moon, but not in the middle of the month, when he had full control over himself. And definitely not when he was cuddling with his mother.
"Remmy, what's been going on in the last few months?" his mother asked him worriedly, sitting up, her body language signalling that she was very serious. "You've been withdrawn more than usual in your letters ever since Christmas, and now you're here, and you've barely gotten out of bed or eaten properly since coming home, and apparently your friends have abandoned you, and this new friend of yours, this girl, you won't even tell me anything substantial about her. Does this have anything to do with the Curse?"
Remus shook his head, clenching his eyes shut and burying his face in his mother's midriff.
"It's complicated, Ma, and I just... Some things I can't tell you, and the rest won't make much sense without that, and... please, let it go? Please."
She sighed, her worry echoing in that exhalation, but didn't push, and his heart hurt with how much he loved her for it.
"What can you tell me, then?"
"Lily's the one who made me realise what my friends had done," he explained to her quietly. "She didn't turn her back on me, even though she'd gotten hurt by our actions. She comes to visit me in the hospital wing every month."
"She knows?"
"Er... yeah. She figured it out." He almost told her Snape knew, too, but held his tongue instead; another thing he couldn't say. "Dumbledore talked to her, and she'd not betray me. She's my friend. I suppose..." he swallowed, wiping his cheeks with his sleeve, "she's special."
"How so?"
"She's the first friend that I made of my own initiative. James and Sirius and Peter, in the beginning, I didn't think they'd want to be my friends, didn't even know what to do, but they kept pushing and pushing and they were the ones who befriended me. Lily's the first person I befriended, and she's... she isn't afraid to let me know when she's displeased, but she's also... she isn't, I don't know, afraid, that saying it, or hearing it either, would be putting the friendship in danger. The guys... all it took was for me to tell them that they were wrong, and they stopped being my friends. But Lily isn't like that."
"Then she is an excellent friend to have," his mother iterated with a nod. "And I, for one, am glad that you have her."
Exhaling, Remus felt something deep in his chest unclench at her words. It wasn't anything much, not really, but it felt a lot like it had a week ago, when he'd realized that he wasn't alone, that even if he'd lost all his old friends, his new one had stuck with him.
So maybe what he really needed to be okay was to find these little assurances, little pieces of himself and within himself, and to build something out of them, someone who was not a coward, and was not a pushover, a person his mother could be proud of.
"James, darling, could you come here for a moment, please?"
Summer life at the Potter Estate was languid and indulgent, and James had settled back into it within a day or two of coming back from Hogwarts. It wasn't too hard, of course; his parents were seemingly never-changing, and the slow routine of the Potter Estate was comforting and familiar enough the sixteen-year-old could slip into and out of it almost on demand.
He'd spent the morning horseback riding and flying, an activity that he thoroughly enjoyed but rarely got to indulge in. His parents had bought him his beloved Fiend, a spirited Granian stallion, when he'd turned fourteen, and the pair had since become a well-oiled speed machine, both on land and in the air. James usually spent his morning in this manner, and that got him rid of most of his usual restless energy.
And if it didn't, he'd found yesterday, there was always the option of simply transforming into Prongs and running as fast as he could. Perhaps Fiend would even be open to racing him, though James knew he'd never manage to outperform a winged horse bred for speed. But that wouldn't be the point, anyway, so James knew he wouldn't mind.
Hopping in his step as he chugged off dusty riding boots – he was sure one of their elves would pick them up and clean them; they always did – James trotted down the hall towards the sitting room in search of his mother, and found both her and his father ensconced in their usual seats, drinking their afternoon tea and eating scones, Fleamont in the large wing-backed chair with the local Muggle newspapers open in his hands, Euphemia half-sitting, half-laying on the ottoman with a book in her lap.
"Mummy?"
"Ah, there you are, darling," his mother said, extending her hand for him, that he took in both of his as he sat himself down beside her. "There is something your father and I wanted to speak with you about."
"Yeah? What's that, then?"
"You remember my friend Queenie Goldstein, from America? Well, a friend of hers is getting married to a British wizard in the fall, and so they've decided to come and see about the venue and the decorations and the dress, of course, and I've invited them to stay with us. It would be Queenie, Leonora Adelmann and her daughter Athenora, I believe she's around your age."
"And I'm guessing you wanted me to show Athenora around?" James asked, smirking lightly.
"I'm sure she will be a delightful companion for you this summer, and the house will be pleasantly lively, won't it, dear?" Euphemia directed her question to her husband, who hummed in agreement and lowered the newspaper slightly to give her a fond look. "In any case, I'm sure it won't take away from your practice time in the least, as I imagine Athenora will want to be quite involved in her mother's wedding organising."
"So does that mean you'll also be busy this summer?" he asked his mother with a teasing smile, which she answered with a delightful one of her own. She loved company, especially company that stayed over as guests.
"It does appear so, doesn't it? Of course, Queenie is also coming because her sister's daughter-in-law is due at the end of the summer, so she will likely be too busy with family to accompany us. But Leonora is a lovely woman, and I cannot imagine any child of hers to be anything else, so between us, I am convinced that we will absolutely manage. And if I ever need any assistance with carrying things during shopping and such..."
"I am at your service, Mummy dearest," James said with a dramatic sweep of his arm, "though I suggest you get the house-elves to help you instead. You know I'm horrid with your shopping sprees."
"That I do, darling, that I do," Euphemia agreed, patting his cheek lightly with her wrinkled hand. Feeling a sudden bout of childish affection, James took her hand and kissed the papery skin on its back, then kissed her cheek before getting up.
"Pops, let me know when you want us to go through the family accounts and whatnot."
"Oh? Does that mean you've decided on what to do after Hogwarts?"
James groaned. "Not really, no. But Pops, I don't think I want to be a businessman like you. It's..."
"Stationary?"
"Dull," he admitted. "I want something exciting."
"Politics can be quite exciting. Your grandfather caused plenty of ruckuses in his time in the Wizengamot, for instance, when that idiot Minister we had at the time refused help during the First World War."
"And got us excluded from the Sacred Twenty-Eight," James reminded his father. In answer, Fleamont waved the notion away with a careless flick of his wrist.
"Who even needs that? Cantankerous Nott was a complete buffoon about that ridiculous notion of Blood Purity; I'd rather we weren't associated with his ideas."
"Whatever you say, Pops."
"Well, you really need to think on this soon, Son; now that you're past your O.W.L.s, it's important you choose the proper subjects for whatever you want to do afterwards."
James was, of course, more than aware of this; in fact, he knew very precisely which subjects he'd be taking, because he'd already decided that he was going to become an Auror. But he was somewhat reluctant to share this with his parents, at least this soon in the summer. It could wait, and besides, it depended on his O.W.L. grades, as well. He was quite confident he'd done well, but one never knew.
"I know, don't worry. I'll figure it out on time."
"That's all I would expect from you, Son."
"You keep that, that... that magic out of this house, boy! I will not see it!"
"So don't look! It's my bloody room!"
"I will know what is going on under my roof! You do not get to tell me–"
"The number of things you don't know about me would buy you enough drink to last you until your liver liquefies of it, you wasteful drunkard!"
"I know that you are as worthless as your mother, boy, that's all I need to know! What is all that magic good for if you can't even make yourself look presentable?! I don't dare show you anywhere with normal, God-fearing folks!"
"As if you know anything about respectable people! Go drown your useless self in the bottom of those pint glasses and leave me in peace!"
"If I see one more thing–"
"It's my fucking room! Stay the hell away from it, or else I'll ward it so that you won't even know it exists anymore!"
"One toe out of line, boy, and I will make you regret it!"
"I know! Go drink yourself into your usual stupor and leave me in fucking peace already!"
The bang of a door smashing into the frame rattled the whole house, and Severus exhaled forcibly, reaching in desperation for those few lessons in Occlumency he'd gotten over the last month, trying as hard as he could to partition and push down the impotent fury his father always awakened in him.
He'd been afraid to yell and fight, once. Back before and during the first years of his magical schooling, when his father had first started drinking heavily and then going off on him, Severus had cowed, had made sure to tiptoe and not arouse the man's fury, because he could be vicious in both tongue and hand, and he'd frightened even his magical, hard wife on some occasions, let alone an eight-year-old boy. But the drink had taken its due over the years, and Severus had grown tall and fast enough to not be such an easy target. He didn't hold his tongue back anymore, not unless his mother was within hearing distance. Tobias was usually too drunk to run up and down the stairs easily, and as a worst case option, Severus had set himself up with ways of climbing out of his room through the window. So long as he avoided being cornered, it wasn't terribly hard to avoid the man's punches, and given how much he drank on average, it was even a surprise the man could think, let alone remember what was said while he was sloshed.
There was a point in the early evening, though, that Severus knew to stay well away from the man. When he managed to find work, Tobias did do his utmost, at least for a time, to keep himself sober, if hungover, throughout the day, and those few hours between arriving home and being drunk were the danger zone, because he was irritable enough and sober enough to do real damage. This wasn't one of those times, however; by ten in the evening, the man was usually drunk enough, and given that it was Friday, Severus' provocation had practically earned him and his mother a completely peaceful night, because Tobias had a tendency to find his drinking buddies if he left this late, and crash at their place.
He wondered if his mother would be thankful for it, or resentful.
Pulling the enforced middle drawer of his dresser out, Severus stepped on it and reached for the hole in the wall behind the piece of furniture, where he kept his most prized possessions hidden from his father. The dresser was an old one, made of wood heavy enough it required some strength to move, and Severus had made sure to stick it to the ground with some less noticeable sticking charms, just to make it extra hard.
He drew his lovely new black wand from the hidey-hole and, making sure to shut the curtains tightly, settled himself on the bed and cast the Patronus Charm, forcing his mind away from the fury still roiling in his gut in favour of remembering Lily's fingers in his from last week's train ride. The doe was happy enough to let him pet her, and having the memory so tangible under his fingers served to calm him better than any Occlumency he'd learned so far. It was a crutch, he knew that perfectly well, but he didn't think even Dumbledore would admonish him for it, not after the week he'd survived.
He felt like all his hard work was slipping away from him, water through cupped fingers, until there was nothing left but the old anger and resentment, the one that had fed him for so long, and that had almost cost him the most precious thing he had in his life. It was so easy now, to forget Dumbledore's words, to forget those hours upon hours he'd spent in that office that housed the oddest of knick-knacks, where he'd learned to do this spell and where he'd found the other sides to himself that he'd forgotten – where he'd found the way to exist without being dependent on his tar-like anger.
Calmer, he recast the spell and let the doe settle on the bed next to him, with her head in his lap, the silvery substance of the spell feeling strangely tingly, peculiar, under his fingers. He wasn't tired, the adrenaline of the shouting match keeping him jittery enough that he could pour this into keeping hold of the memory that gave his doe her shape, into the magic she needed to keep existing. He knew he'd pay for this in the morning, but right now, he needed the comfort too much.
He missed Lily with a hungry ache. It had been a week since they'd parted at her front door, and they'd agreed to take some time to sort things out at home before meeting up again. They'd left it all vague, but there was an unspoken understanding where and when they'd be meeting, and Severus found his way to their tree every day at five-thirty in the afternoon, because even sitting for two hours in sweltering heat waiting for someone who wouldn't come was better than being in the house when Tobias dragged himself in, looking for his drink and a fight.
The doe Patronus made him think about the events of the last months, the train and the lake and the laboratory before it, her sobs and the weight of purposely unacknowledged truth in his stomach. About the trust that had once been given and taken freely between them, worn away under the grind of platitudes and white lies and disappointment. About the expectations failed, and the friendship almost lost, saved not by Severus' regrets and apologies, but by Dumbledore's assurances of his life choices.
They'd so fundamentally misunderstood each other over the last years, seeing what they wanted to see instead of what was really there, and in light of their conversation about trust, Severus could finally figure out where the problem had come about – Lily had trusted him instead of her knowledge of him, and so of course he'd continued to disappoint her when she'd believed him to be something he wasn't, when he'd not grasped that those two things were in fact separate and unequal, not in his own infatuated blindness about her faults.
And now that he understood that these two things differed, that relying on effectively predicting a person's thoughts and feelings and actions was not the same as putting your trust in them, now Severus thought of their other disagreement, over what friendship was and how much it was worth, and the memory of Lily's tear-stained face bubbled up past his mental shields, sweeping with it a terrifying coldness into his soul.
He'd told her that he'd learned all he knew of friendship from her, that theirs was the model by which he conducted all others, but friendship was based on trust, according to her, and the trust between him and Lily was as different as it could be from the trust on which his interactions with Avery's group rested, and that implied that the friendships were fundamentally different too – so did that mean that he was mistaken? Were those similarities he believed existed actually there, or had he let the assumption of similarity cloud his judgment?
This, this was that one tripping point, the hinge around which all their interactions in the past revolved. If he'd only been seeing their friendship as exploitative and it actually hadn't been, what did that mean about his own actions in light of that view? Had he been acting exploitatively towards Lily, or was this also something he was only perceiving wrongly? He'd never before thought to compare how he acted with her to how he acted with the Slytherins. Was this the reason for his own side of their misunderstanding, why he couldn't figure her out – because he'd been treating her according to a wrong assumption?
Lily had agreed with him about the similarities between their interactions and Severus' interactions with the Slytherins. She'd agreed with him so much that she'd broken down sobbing over it, over the way she had acted towards him, in the way that made sense to him, and yet she'd completely fallen apart when she'd admitted it, and he'd not understood then, but it was so obvious now – she'd not believed this to be the case, she had made it clear that she'd never considered their friendship to be of the exploitative kind until two weeks ago, until he'd insisted, until–
Until he'd convinced her of something that had been his wrong perception. He'd defined friendship in the wrong way, using the wrong parameters, and he'd insisted that they were right until she'd agreed. She'd agreed, and it had broken her, but now he was coming to realise that this wasn't the truth, that this was wrong, so what if...
Had he made her doubt and question herself for a completely wrong perspective of the whole thing on his part?
That tremor in her voice, on the train last week, when she'd asked him if he trusted her after everything, now it made sense, and it made him sick to his stomach: because Lily, no matter whether she'd agreed with him or not, was not someone for whom this was instinctive behaviour, and so she was not only dealing with finding a part of herself to be untrue to how she'd thought it was based on possibly faulty fact she'd gotten from him, but also the influence she perceived that this had had on Severus, and this was something she would not have been able to easily forgive or overcome, so she thought that he couldn't, either, when he'd never even thought twice about it.
His doe dissolved under his fingertips, letting his hand fall limply onto his thigh and dissipating all light in the room until Severus was sat in complete darkness. He barely noticed it, too stunned by his realisation to give thought to anything else.
It was guilt that he had put there, Severus, that probably had no place to be there at all, and the worst part was that he even now didn't see a tenth of the devastation and harm that Lily did in such a perception of relationships. It hardly mattered, though, because he had hurt Lily, he'd hurt her again, and this time in a way she'd not even noticed, in a way he'd not noticed. No wonder she was so tentative with him now, when he'd convinced her that all their previous interactions had not been genuinely truthful, when he'd made her lose her trust them and in her perception of them. Of course she'd been so stunned that he still trusted her, of course, now it made all the sense in the world.
This sort of deception wasn't in Lily's nature. He had somehow completely disregarded this fact, and whether it was because it was in the nature of every single other person he interacted with, or because he'd gotten the wrong impression and trusted in that instead of Lily herself when it came to how she saw him, or because things always seemed distorted when the relationship was discordant, it didn't change the fact that Lily's turmoil and distress were directly his fault.
The guilt that came with this realisation left Severus petrified with fear, because if their relationship failed this time, it was going to be his fault, and his alone, not Golden Boy Potter's, not because of their House rivalry, not his friends or hers, not Lily herself. It was going to be his, because he'd sown the seeds in his own utter blindness and misapprehension, and while the thought of losing her to an external influence was possibly the hardest one he'd ever had to face, the thought of losing her to his own actions... that was unbearable, in light of everything he'd gone through to avoid it and how it had changed her mind in the end, especially because there was one thing which he knew would lead to exactly this if he let things just continue on without changing them.
I am unbearably proud of you.
No one had ever told him that in his life, no one had said those exact words in that exact tone, as if they were choking on emotion, as if it was something that demanded to be given voice. Severus knew a lot about unbearable, and the thought that this was how Lily felt about his choice to side with her and Dumbledore and the Light, it vindicated everything, every half-slept night, every nerve-racking encounter, every hurt feeling. In those days when he'd thought he'd lost her forever, driven by sheer desperation not to lose the purpose of it, Severus had owned his choice, had rethought it and re-appropriated it, had set it apart from everything Lily represented and meant to him, and this was something that remained with him even now when the need for it had turn moot, but it also didn't change the sheer joy of having Lily be proud of his actions, nor the devastation of walking that path without her.
And none of it had changed the fact that he'd hurt her even before their conversation on Hogsmeade Weekend, hurt her by acting on beliefs and convictions that should have made it impossible for them to tolerate one another, hurt her for reasons that he'd not even thought to look for until she'd told him – I know that one day, me being me won't be enough, and you'll find yourself using it purposefully on me, too. That statement of hers was so terrifying exactly for the possibility that it held, because that word, that slur that he now hated from the bottom of his heart, it meant little on its own and much as an obvious representation of his whole system of belief – the one thing he now forced himself to acknowledge Lily would never be able to forgive, because after all, she barely had the last time, and Severus wasn't fool enough to think one ever got more than a single second chance.
Yes, he understood now that it was that system of belief, not the word itself, that had done the real damage during the O.W.L.s – had been doing the damage long before the incident by the lake, really; it was the thought that he saw her as worth less than, that he was incapable of believing in such a drastic double standard, that had frightened her and made her mistrust him, that had led to the distance between them and to the confusion about what sort of friendship they had, to Severus causing Lily so much upset two weeks ago. And really, for all of Severus' conviction – or perhaps, now he really thought of it, just wishful thinking – that she was wrong, he couldn't escape the fact that he had, in fact, reached for the belief that had felt more encompassing in the moment of his utter humiliation, had used it to hurt the one person he'd never thought himself capable of hurting.
Even if their friendship survived Lily's identity crisis, if it survived their fights and misunderstandings and drifting away, unless Severus truly found a way to change his own views on Muggles and Muggle-borns, it would be doomed to failure regardless, because those views would always be at the root of his own actions, and if something would finally drive her away from him, it would be his own actions, that was clear enough to him now that she was truly making an effort to rebuild their relationship from her side.
He didn't know how to do this, though. How was he supposed to suddenly start seeing something inherently less than himself as equal, when his future only held the certainty of such company as believed the same things that he did? How was he supposed to balance Dumbledore's tasks with Lily's expectations, when both only needed one slip on his part to completely crumble beneath his feet? Because he fully remembered Lily's fury and outrage at the actions of his companions, at his actions, towards the seventh years; she'd ultimately broken their friendship over the fact that he'd become so much like those other Slytherin boys, those Junior Death Eaters, and it was impossible to differentiate himself from them, despite his firm resolve to stand by his choice, to stand by the Light and her, because he found so much more in common with their beliefs than hers, because knowingly or not, he'd acted and done as they had, and if she knew, if she saw this to be the case before he figured out a way of changing his own beliefs, then that would be the end of it.
He couldn't even bear the thought of it, which meant that there was only one option left to him – he needed to make certain she never learned this truth while it was still true, needed to ensure that there was no way for her to grasp this before he managed to somehow make it obsolete.
Enid Pettigrew was in hospital. Peter had gotten this information from one of her nosy neighbours after he'd been knocking a bit too loudly on her door for a bit too long the night he arrived back from Hogwarts. According to the old nosy Muggle, she'd been run over by a car three days before, and though the man didn't know how she was, he did at least know which hospital she was in, so Peter wasted no time getting there.
It took him half an hour to get to the hospital, then another half hour of trying to convince them to let him see her in spite of the fact that the visiting hours were over, during which his frustration had made tears run over, just to make the humiliation so complete. Humiliating or not, though, the tears ended up being what worked, because the nurse on duty finally sighed and acquiesced to let him in for ten minutes.
Peter detested people feeling sorry for him, despised the feeling from the bottom of his heart, but if life had taught him something, it was that you used whatever you had at your disposal, no matter how much it galled. So he did exactly that – he used the fact that this woman thought him a poor, distraught boy, and he got in, and that hatred he felt for her pity, he turned that into disdain, because it was his weapon, his spell, to get what he wanted, and she didn't even know.
His aunt was reading a book when he gently opened the door to the room, her bed on the far side of it, by the window. Of the other two, one was occupied by an elderly woman who appeared to be dozing, while the other was empty. He made less than three steps before Enid noticed him, and one look made her put down her book and give him a sad, gentle look.
"Oh, my darling," she whispered when he was close enough that he could hear her and they'd not disturb the other occupant of the room. Peter bent into the circle of her extended arms and buried his face into her neck, breathing in the familiar, mossy smell of her shampoo. "I am so, so sorry."
Peter shook his head and let her guide him to sit by her on the bed. His aunt's left leg all the way up to the hip was in a cast, and there was ugly, painful-looking bruising on that side of her face, too, with several cuts and gashes littering her pale skin. She looked like she had other injuries, too, but it was hard for Peter to figure that out, and he shied away from it at the thought of this further proof of his aunt's utter fragility.
"How is she?" was his aunt's first question, and when Peter clenched his fists in his lap, she covered the closer one with her wrinkled palm, that had an IV line stuck to the top of it.
"On a binge."
Enid sighed, closing her eyes, and her forehead furrowed in pain.
"She was looking forward to having you back, so much."
Peter unclenched his fist, and his aunt slid her fingers between his immediately.
"I feared she'd blame herself for my accident," Enid continued, subdued, hazel eyes gentle and loving as they roamed Peter's face. "We'd been shopping, and she wanted us to have lunch at the Leaky Cauldron – her treat, she said, with her first proper pay check, oh, Petey, she was so very proud of it too, I had so hoped – but I had a lesson and had to leave early, and she wanted to stay and finish her glass of butterbeer, and the driver came out of nowhere as I was stepping outside, didn't see me properly for the Muggle-repelling spells on the pub."
Peter knew the rest of that story intimately. "She thought that if she'd only come out with you, she'd have been able to prevent it, to Apparate you two or something."
"Yes, I believe so," Enid answered.
"She hasn't been able to Apparate successfully in years," was all that stuck in his mind at the thought.
"Oh, darling, you know it makes no difference," Enid reminded him. "Whether or not she could have used a spell to pull me out of the way, or anything else... it was an accident, Peter. Accidents happen. Your mother... your mother has lost her belief in such a thing a long time ago."
Peter clenched his aunt's hand and swallowed, shutting his eyes so tightly bright spots appeared in his black field of vision.
"I hate him. I hate him."
It was the one thing never spoken between the three of them, not since the day when Enid had sat him down and explained to him that his father was not coming back. But he couldn't hold it in, not anymore, and he didn't care if his words hurt the woman whose long-fingered hand was clutching his tightly.
"I do, too," she said, with such venom in her voice that Peter swallowed compulsively. He didn't dare look at her, at what he knew would be blazing in his aunt's eyes to accompany her voice, and a thought passed through his mind, that if his aunt but had the use of magic at her disposal, that she would have tracked her bastard of a brother down and murdered him in cold blood.
Peter felt his eyes filling with tears again, and hated himself for it, too.
I hate him, and I hate my mother, and I hate you too, he thought wildly, rattling inside his own skin, the need to shift and shrink and scurry away as a rat nearly overwhelming. I hate you for getting hurt, and I hate her for being weak, and I hate him for leaving, and I hate my sodding life. I wish I was gone.
"Petey," his aunt's voice pulled him back from his mad thoughts, and he found that he'd become as tense as one of the strings in that piano his aunt loved so much. Breathing out, he forced himself to relax as he lifted his eyes to meet Enid's. "We will get through this summer, together. I will not leave you, broken hip or no."
He jumped off the bed, feeling a strange manic energy suffuse him.
"I'll go to St Mungo's, they'll have a healer who'll fix you right up. Or, or, a private physician. There is no reason for you to suffer the, the– what..." he took a breath, licking his lips, "what, uh, are your injuries, Aunty? I didn't, I should have asked that first, I'm sorry, I–"
Enid shushed him and shook her head. "Broken hip and leg, some internal bleeding – my troublesome kidney – but I will be fine. And you do not need to find any healers. In fact, I don't think it would be smart at all, while I'm here. When I'm released – I truly hope soon, but I live alone and they are reluctant – then all right, but bringing them here would mean changing records and changing memories and–"
"That's what magic is for," he said quietly, his energy leaving him as fast as it had come, so that now he simply felt defeated and clumsy.
"Perhaps, but you know magic isn't my world," she gently reminded him, and it stung, it stung to the quick, because why should it matter if she could do magic or not, why should it matter when magic could make everything so much easier.
He knew how to get her to agree, though, he knew the exact button to push – all he had to do was tell her he couldn't do it alone, he couldn't handle his mother alone, and she'd cave, of course she would, she'd never refuse him that, she loved him as a son – but one look at her tired face, and he remembered how much it had cost her to come back to the wizarding world properly after Peter's father had left them, and he couldn't do it.
If his aunt didn't want to take the benefit of something that had been unreachable to her, something that she'd had to learn to work around when her whole family benefited from it and looked down on her for her handicap, then that was her right, and Peter couldn't find it in himself to push her against it.
"All right," he told her. "But when you're home, will you please reconsider?"
"I will. I promise, darling," Enid answered. "Will you manage until then?"
He was going to handle his mother by himself; he was almost in his majority, he knew the back alleyways of London, both magical and Muggle, like the palm of his hand, and it was his due, anyway. Lauris was his mother, nothing at all by blood to Enid, and Peter would shoulder that burden alone.
Perhaps he was weak and stupid and clumsy, as Sirius and James believed, but it was the best that his mother had, and so he would not disappoint her, like she'd been disappointing him for what felt like his whole life. And he was certainly not going to disappoint Enid, who was the one good thing he had to call his own in this miserable life outside of Hogwarts.
Peter decided; he was going to do whatever it took, use whichever skills he had at his disposal, and he was going to manage it alone.
"Yes. I'll be fine."
Lily found Petunia in her room, sitting on the bed with another magazine in her hands, with the fan turned to the highest blowing straight into her face. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, but it looked limp and sweaty, and there was a damp spot on her summer dress, starting at her collarbone and moving down between her breasts. Lily felt instant sympathy as she wiped her own perspiration off her forehead. They had an air conditioner downstairs in the living room, but not in their rooms, and the heat hadn't abated since she'd come home; if anything, it had only gotten worse.
Lily herself had escaped the living room, though, because her mother had invited Guthrie Dalloway for tea and biscuits, the father of Lily and Petunia's old primary school friends Martine and Marissa, with whom Lily hadn't spoken in years – though her father had informed her in one of his recent letters that Petunia and Martine were certainly still the best of friends, and were going to be moving into a flat together in London in the fall, for Martine's university and Petunia's typist courses. Lily assumed her mother and Mr Dalloway would be talking particulars on this topic and, hoping very dearly that she wouldn't come up in discussion (because they might raise some rather uncomfortable questions as to why she wasn't still friends with Marissa that Lily really knew she couldn't honestly answer), she'd decided to take her leave to lessen the temptation. Additionally, she found herself a bit worried about her mother slipping up about magic if she stayed where Monica could see her, and if this was just her growing paranoia speaking, of being cornered into yet another conversation about magic, then she didn't care one iota about it.
"What d'you want?" Petunia asked, not even looking up from her magazine.
"I wanted to ask you if you'd have time this week to go shopping?"
Frowning in condescending disbelief, Petunia looked up at her.
"You weren't seriously expecting me to go along with Mum's ridiculous idea, were you?"
"I didn't think it was ridiculous," Lily replied, frowning herself. "I do need the clothes, and you'd know where all the best stores are far better than I."
"Yes, because the only place you ever shop is that Zigzag Alley down in London."
"Diagon Alley," the correction slipped with the spark of annoyance that shot through Lily. She always did this, her sister – pretended that she knew nothing of Lily's world, that it was so inconsequential she couldn't be bothered to remember, when she knew it all just to do things like this, out of spite. Petunia made a snitty face at her and looked down at her own magazine demonstratively. "Look, Tuney–"
"What, Liliput?" Petunia snapped back, smacking the magazine on the bed with repressed fury. "What is it you want from me?"
Lily began considering immediate retreat. When Petunia started resorting to that detestable nickname she'd come up with during their earliest childhood, it meant she was not going to be reasoned with. But Lily had come here with a purpose, and she wasn't going to let Petunia dictate this conversation, not this time.
"I would like to spend time with you, as a matter of fact," she said bluntly, and a bit snippily, instead. "I've not seen you in six months, and we've not done one thing together since I've come home for the summer. If you'd rather do something else..."
"We have spent far too much time together, if you ask me; I cannot seem to escape you, as a matter of fact!"
"What?"
"Every time you come back into the house, all anyone ever talks about is 'Lily this' and 'Lily that' and 'oh, isn't magical Lily so, so much better than her plain, average sister Petunia'! I am sick of listening to the same thing over and over!"
"I don't want to talk about it any more than you do!" Lily exclaimed, exasperated by Petunia's stubborn persistence to pick a fight, the sweat sliding down her own back, and the damnable heat she couldn't escape. "I'm sick of it, too, you know!"
"Oh, don't pretend you don't adore their attention," Petunia said snidely. "Lily the perfect daugh–"
"I'm not, alright?! I'm not perfect, Petunia, and you have no idea how utterly frustrating it is to have her keep saying it over and over and then not paying a bit of attention to what I'm actually telling her!"
"So, you don't want their attention all of a sudden?" the older girl asked, for the first time in the conversation sounding genuinely incredulous.
"No! I want them to leave well enough alone and talk about anything other than Hogwarts!"
"Why?"
"I–" stalling, Lily shut her mouth and shook her head. "Why should I tell you? You'll only use it to put me down about my problems, like you always do."
"It's got to do with Snape, doesn't it?" Petunia said shrewdly, startling Lily with her perceptiveness; she always forgot that Petunia was actually more than a little intelligent, and knew how to use it in the most uncomfortable of ways.
"I am not talking to you about Severus; all you'll do is insult him and then insult me for having him as a friend."
"So it is about him. What's he done now?"
"What?"
"Out with it, Lily," Petunia demanded, climbing to her feet. "What's he done?"
"Nothing! Or, not– look, it's irrelevant; I'm dealing with it."
"Lily–"
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Petunia! Let it go!"
"Just tell me!"
"He called me 'Mudblood'!"
In the silence that followed, Lily shut her eyes tightly and took a moment to wonder, through her laboured breath, whether she could sneak her way into the Ministry of Magic and steal a Time-Turner, just the once.
Maybe throwing herself out of the window would be more effective. Time-Turners worked on a stable time loop principle, after all; it wasn't like she'd be able to stop herself from blurting that little gem out with one, anyway.
"He did what?"
"Tuney..."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Snapping her eyes open, Lily glared incredulously at the older girl. "Because I get the feeling that you don't actually want to know anything about my life? You sure do put me down for it, and besides, I know how much you hate Severus."
"That nasty little freak. You've broken off with him for good, now, haven't you?"
Lily's patience snapped. "As a matter of fact, Petunia, I've not, and I am not telling you any of my reasons for it, either, because you don't get to use this to evade the original topic, and you certainly don't get to act antagonistic one minute and overprotective the next! Pick one and stick with it, yeah?"
Clearly insulted, Petunia sniffed at her and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Very well; if you choose to be like that–"
"If I choose to be–" From somewhere in the back of her mind, Lily dredged up the initial intent of her visit to her sister's room. "No. No, you are not doing this again. I came here to ask you if you'd like to spend time with me by going shopping, because I need new clothes, and you know far more about fashion than I do. I will not let you goad me into a fight just so that you can feel righteous about refusing me."
"Righteous? Is that what I feel?"
"Well, you certainly act it, don't you?"
"You are the one hogging attention in this house! You are the one who is praised and glorified, while all I ever accomplish is completely irrelevant to Mum and Dad! All–"
"You're right."
"–they ever– I'm sorry, what?"
"I said, you're right."
Finally, that shut her up.
"I'm right?"
"Yes."
"So now you're mocking me."
"No, I'm perfectly serious. You are right, I seem to be all they talk about, and they're being utterly unrealistic about me, too. I don't actually like being thought of as perfect, Petunia, it makes me feel like I can't satisfy their expectations, which is not a nice feeling, as you so well must know." Sighing, Lily wiped the sweat off the back of her neck. "Petunia, please. I don't want to fight with you, I don't want to have these standoffs with you. I want... I want us to not spend this whole bloody freaking unbearably hot summer at each other's throats. Is that something you'd be open to, or should I just not talk to you until September at all? Because just now, I'd rather have two months of silence than two months of fighting."
Petunia stared at her as if Lily was some alien she'd never been confronted with before, and Lily felt her little flame of hope resignedly wilting. She'd expected something like this, of course, but she'd still found herself reaching for–
"Very well; what do you need?"
"What?"
"The clothes? That's why you're here, aren't you? Clothes shopping?"
"I... shirts. I need shirts that fit me better; I think my, er, my bust has grown some more in the last half-year, I can't button mine the shirts up without that horrid, embarrassing hole between buttons appearing over it. And a bathing suit or two. Especially if it's going to be this hot the whole bloody summer."
"I can do Friday, if you're actually going to condescend to listen to me for once about the fashion."
"I'm vetoing stuff I hate, and if I fall in love with something, I reserve the right to buy it – you aren't getting a carte blanche to police my style – but otherwise, yes, I promise to defer to your superior knowledge of the fashion."
Petunia measured her sharply, no doubt trying to figure out if Lily was genuine, and whatever she found obviously wasn't a singing-praises kind of endorsement, but it was enough.
"All right. I need to get some catalogues for you look through, and we're going to go through them on Thursday to figure out which stores to target; I refuse to walk around like a headless chicken in this heat while you try to make up your mind between one boring shirt and another."
For a moment Lily felt genuinely insulted, but forced herself to let it go. Baby steps. Even this much was better than she'd had half an hour ago, and if she could only train herself to ignore her sister's snide digs and jabs that peppered every other sentence, she thought she might actually succeed in finding something that could serve as a shared activity through which they could bond.
"Good, thanks; I'd not want to spend hours trudging around with shopping bags either."
They left it at that, which was not nearly what Lily had truly wished for, but was far better than she'd thought she'd get.
Baby steps. Lily supposed that was as good a mantra as anything.
A/N: Some Americans are popping up soonish, which means that there will be some names showing up from Fantastic Beasts. This is names only - Queenie Goldstein isn't a character in this story, and beyond her being the sister of Porpentina Goldstein who is the wife of Newt Scamander, I am not taking anything from the new canon as fact or part of my universe. The same goes for Ilvermorny - it's one of the North American magical schools (because there has got to be more than one, and certainly more than only of British origins), but all that Pottermore rot about how it was created and how it functions is null and void here, because it's derivative and unimaginative of already existing material, even without going into the rest of the mess that is JKR's attempt at creating American magical history (if you don't know what I'm talking about, look up the criticism of JKR's pretty colonialist reappropriation of Native American heritage). When and if I need details, I'll decide on whether I'll use any of the new canon or not, but either way, I'll make sure to explain everything so as to not create any confusion in my own text. For now, all that's relevant is that these people and places exist in the background and that's where they'll stay.
Also, the references to how hot the summer is will be continuing (actually, the weather almost became an extra character in a way) because the summer of 1976 was the driest, hottest summer in Britain's history of weather recording up until then, resulting in serious droughts all throughout the country, to the point where they even appointed a 'Minister for Drought' (that everyone made fun of). Given that rainy weather is almost a staple of Britain's depiction in fiction, I think the fact that they had practically no rainfall at all in months illustrates the severity of the situation nicely.