Work Text:
Spinner’s End, Cokeworth, Early-mid 2000’s
It’s been years.
Walking down the streets of Spinner’s End.
They stumbled upon the seemingly abandoned playground.
Somehow it was creepier than a graveyard.
Nobody lived there anymore.
Nobody went to that playground in years.
The weeds were so tall that they reached past Severus’ hip bones.
He stopped for a moment to look at it. Remembering the last time he was there, as a young child, with Lily of course, on their summer break before their third year.
Evelyn, sensing what he must have thought about, took his hand and squeezed it, before leading him closer to the playground, following the remains of an old beaten dirt path in order to gather as few sticky weeds and pebbles into her high-heeled shoes as possible.
Once they were on the playground itself, she sat on one of the two swings. They were rickety and the wood was rotten, the chains connecting the swings to the metal bars were decrepit and rusty, but they didn’t fall apart upon being used again after so long. As if by magic or something of the sorts.
She smiled and tapped the swing next to hers. And he joined her.
And they sat, playing, swinging on a set of swings. Together.
He felt like he was twelve again.
Like he was free again. And now he was.
But this time around, he had someone who would stay with him. Forever .
And he smiled, a big, true smile.
Finding joy in little things, he felt like he could weep.
Evelyn, on the other hand, laughed. A true, sonorous laugh.
And he joined her with a deepthroated rumble of his own.
And once they were about to leave, he checked a nearby tree. A massive, ancient oak tree. A pedunculate, or an English oak at that. Or, as referred to when he was a little boy “The one that offered the most shade.”
He searched its south side, the one covered with the least amount of moss, also the side visible only when approaching the tree from the stone wall that surrounded one part of the park, that way it was hidden. It was a secret, something just for yourself and your closest friend.
He searched its bark for the carvings, and at the top of the tree, he found someone carved in the name Josie inside of a heart since the last time he checked the tree, some eighteen years ago..
Upon finding no other marks on that part of the old tree, he continued to search further down, somewhere a couple of nine-year-olds actually could reach.
And then he found them. The names that were carved in decades ago.
Lily & Severus
The wobbly lines and the shallow cuts were the obvious indicators of the work being done by small and inexperienced hands.
But still, the mark remained even when the person didn’t. And the mark would stay as long as the tree’s bark was still there.
He remembered that day clearly. And how they sneaked into his da’s drawer and borrowed his Swiss knife in order to do it.
He still could feel the pain from the punishment he received for doing that. His father used his leather belt, with a heavy metal buckle, and spared no-
He shook himself out of that particular thought, took out his wand from its secret holster on his hip, and he conjured a small yet extremely sharp blade.
He expertly carved his initials into the bark, not too far away from where he had carved in his name previously. He added a plus sign too, just above his name.
Once he did so, he handed the blade over to Evelyn, handle first.
She took it with a smile and carved in her own initials above his without a question. She then proceeded to carve in a heart shape around both of their initials.
E.B.
+
S.S.
Satisfied with their work, Severus took Evelyn’s hand and led her away, down the streets of the Spinner’s End back to their houses.
It felt good to do something childish for a change. It was freeing. A feeling he couldn’t describe if he was asked to, for it was a feeling he hadn’t felt in so long.
Appropriately, a gust of wind flew into their faces at that moment, and he took a lungful of the fresh air, revelling in the fact that the air wasn’t as polluted as when he was a child, with the factory being shut down what felt like a lifetime ago now. His hair wild in the breeze. Evelyn’s too.
His childhood seemed like a completely different story now, like some sort of a different reality. Sometimes he had wondered if he had perhaps dreamt it all.
His mother, his father, Lily, everything he went through in his youth in this damned town.
Nothing mattered anymore.
No one but her .
Evelyn, his Evelyn.
His salvation.