Chapter 1
Notes:
broad strokes. setting the scene.
Chapter Text
Toby's lad, six years and staring, knows he'll never be as old as his Nanna.
Thick hands hold him, whisper about the Russkies and Yanks, about the moon that will never be enough.
Toby's lad, small and weak, combs the stars for rocket ships like Da used to look for Heinkels.
Peter-from-next-door's casket is closed. Blown to hell in Ireland, Da says, then scolds Severus for eavesdropping.
"Wise lad," he says when he's scared.
Hiroshima is a primary school topic.
('That's history now?' Toby bitterly asks, to Ma's confusion.)
In '84 he waits for – welcomes – acid rain.
It never comes.
Chapter Text
Hair like rust reaches across the planes of his chest, sticking to his sweat-damp skin. Burning cobwebs.
Summer sun vaults high into the unmarked skies, beating with a vengeance hitherto unheard of up North, or so it feels. Every pulse is impact trauma carrying through, but he lets Lily curl into his side.
Fourteen is too old for friends to lie together in underwear and nothing more.
Let them talk. It's all they do.
Severus – selfish, cruel – doesn't care what they think, just like he doesn't care about the IRA turning up in London.
Lily sighs, all drama and misery.
Chapter Text
Petunia glares, and Severus glares back. Back hunched, elbows on the table, eyes level to the top of the glass – she looks like she wants to chastise him, but he's thirteen now, and Lily's not here.
Hal coughs then, eyebrow silently arching. The older girl smirks.
Apple juice is cold to his lips, the rhythmic workings of his throat. Sovereigns make the smell-scape of the Evans household as Doctor breathes quietly.
Teacher is away, Rose now insisting her husband stays home on her hospital trips.
It's not so uncomfortable anymore as he waits for Lily – still asleep at nearly noon.
Chapter Text
Theology makes its bed in Severus's life so slowly that he doesn't notice at first.
Melancholy Jesus-eyes surveying the breakfast spread. The cross over his bedroom door. High stone ceilings which make hymns sear through him like a new soul tearing.
Guilt complex; ripe and bulging.
The way Lily said 'May the force be with you' as they walked out the cinema, and how he replied 'And also with you' without thinking. Not humour; reflex.
How she'd laughed, and he'd made a joke about throwing himself under a bus.
Oil-soaked holly wreaths burning on wrong headstones.
Scripture on heretic graves.
Chapter Text
A point:
The blokes from the pub always look with wide eyes when they find out that Toby named his boy. They always figured the wife. The quiet woman. Brown-skinned and oddly habited.
But Severus is Toby's idea. Severus like the Emperor, like stern. His other boy – Rita's lad – has Pythagoras for a middle name, and his mum always regretted letting Toby choose.
A point:
It was a toss up between Severus and Diogenes. Diogenes the philosopher, who would throw away his drinking bowl to prove a point. Spite, will, and Cynicism.
A point:
Diogenes has nothing and wants nothing.
Chapter Text
"You're gay," Lily tells him one day in her bedroom, and Severus doesn't know what to say because he's pretty sure she's wrong.
He's sitting on her rug, and her head is in his lap, apple-red hair fanned over blue denim, and it isn't strange, because it's them.
Fire drips off her cheeks like honey from a spool or wax from a candle.
"I don't mind, by the way."
Young Americans spills out from the radio, and Lily's smile is cherry-pink and freckled. Maybe more than one thing is beautiful.
He doesn't know what to say until he does.
"Okay."
Chapter Text
Hal weeps in closed rooms, Severus's ear pressed to the other side of the door.
The girls cry freely. Her flowerpatch watering itself.
"I'm stage four, baby. You know there's no stage five."
Sweet words, worried hands. Arranging flowers in a white room.
"Don't smoke," she warns.
"Why?" Bemused. Ruing. "You didn't."
Lungs, liver, leukemia; triple-threat, Teacher jokes. Body and blood.
She kisses his crown like one of her own. Frail knuckles press to his lips. An unholy sacrament.
Rose.
He breathes her in. Second mother. Third.
Petunia buys Sovereigns – says they're for her dad. Silver curls out of windows.
Chapter Text
Dingy doors hide dingy rooms in the alley which lives up to its name, living by night as he tries to sleep.
Their little habitat. A full sized mattress on the floor; a bed of three, all twisted around one another like ivy. Severus's arm flung haphazard over Lily's waist as she holds her little boy close, just one and growing out of cots.
"Aren't you scared?" she asks one day, as he prepares her son's bottle like the wards aren't bending around them.
"Of course I am," he answers, teasing, "But if you see death in Damascus, why run?"
Chapter Text
Granny's wake is held in her fleur-de-lis front room. Open casket, closed eyes. It's okay if he touches her, says Michael, his cousin. Holds her hand, kisses her head. Severus firmly tells him that he would rather fucking not, in that obstinate, cranky way which young people do when they are trying not to be upset.
She still smells like tobacco and vanilla. Biscuits baking in her kitchen. Severus licking the spoon.
Settling in her chair, feet pulled under, he is both her garden-path snails and their homes, picking at the loose strands until the fabric around him comes undone.
CoffeeBee9 on Chapter 1 Tue 02 Aug 2022 05:09PM UTC
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