FIC for lavinialavender: "Observations Unobserved"
Title: Observations Unobserved
Author: jenwryn
Recipient: lavinialavender
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~3,000
Warnings: Some mild coarse language; wanders around canon nervously.
Summary: Told mostly from Lily’s PoV, this story presents a series of moments from Lily and Severus’s relationship. Swinging between childhood and adolescence, Hogwarts and summer holidays, happiness and not-so-happiness, together they weave a story of friendship and love.
Author's Notes: I really did intend to avoid angst, but my muse is to angst as bees are to honey - but, at the very least, I’ve attempted to make it hopeful honey! It’s a little experimental (at least for me), which is probably not the smartest thing to do for a Fic Exchange, but my muse has had to work overtime on this one, what with Real Life baying at the door, and she seems to work her weirdest under pressure. Either way, I do hope lavinialavender enjoys it. That’s the main thing."
Observations Unobserved
I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love
I don’t know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you…
~ George Harrison, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, 1968.
***
Lily Evans sat in the library at Hogwarts and wished that they were allowed to fling the windows open. It wasn’t as though there weren’t enough windows. There were, more than enough. Windows encircled the massive booked space, punctuating shelves and desk nooks like smeared arches of warm, coloured light. But none of them were open, not a single pane of glass was pushed aside or upwards to let in even the smallest gasp of air. Of course, the stuff outside was probably still hanging limp and motionless like it had been at lunch time, but surely even that couldn’t be as bad as the stale nothingness within the library. Gone was the dusky, sweet smell of old books that Lily so loved, lost and hidden, as it were, beneath the heatwave. Instead the air tasted faintly metallic and she was continuously distracted by the way the sweat, dull and sticky, was gluing her hair in lank, red strands against her neck. She used her quill to lift it from her skin and the dark ink that dripped against her felt cool to the touch.
It wasn’t supposed to be this hot. There were averages and norms when it came to the weather, but the year was ignoring them all. It’s a fine one for the record books, their Herbology professor kept declaring, drizzling water from his wand onto rows of wilting plants with a grim expression lurking behind his ginger moustache. Hogwarts is in the north, for the love of Merlin.
Lily didn’t want to even imagine what it would like be when summer officially arrived. Worse, when summer officially arrived and she had to head home, head south, head back down towards the industrialised heat and swelter of the Muggle world. She didn’t like thinking about going home at the best of times. Not that she didn’t adore seeing her family - she did, truly. But not a scrap of magic for that many weeks? Ehe.
In fact, the only decent thing about it would be having Severus all to herself and no-one to find it strange.
***
Fear, fear, fear. A small boy beneath starched sheets, knees drawn to chin, immobile, hands clasped over ears yet straining to hear every sound, every shout, every sob, from the kitchen below - and outside, a storm rages black.
Rage, rage, rage, His father bellows and his mother is dissolving into incoherence, no, no, not my boy you bastard, not my Severus, vent your spleen on someone else, and her scream of pain cuts white through night as he does exactly that.
Nerves, nerves, nerves. A grown lad sits in a schoolroom, worn boots against stone, head towards a book, and glances sideways now and then at a certain flip of red hair, trying to work out if her affectionate words are more real than his father.
***
‘You’re Muggle-born, so someone from the school will have to come and explain it to your parents…’
Severus’s words bounced like an excited terrier inside Lily’s head as she stared in amazement at the woman standing outside their front door. Not a woman, Lily corrected herself with delight in Severus’s voice, but a witch. Oh, if Sev were here right now she’d hug him silly! It’s all real, it’s all real, we get to go to school together and be magic… The stranger was smiling at her with amused interest, looking both at Lily and somehow past her as well, down the hall, as though trying to decide whether Lily’s parents were actually at home.
‘You must be Lily Evans, am I correct?’ said the witch - for it was more of a statement than a question. ‘I’m here to see your mother and father, dear. I do believe that a letter from the school ought to already have arriv-’
Minerva McGonagall never had the chance to finish her sentence because Lily span on the spot, making the hall rug entwine in itself like the curl atop a cone of softened ice-cream and, almost tripping, the child raced off down the hall into the cool shadows of the backrooms, screeching, ‘Mum! Mum! It’s just like I said, it is, you have to come! Come quickly, Mum! It’s a lady from Hogwarts!’
It wasn’t the first time Minerva had seen a similar reaction, though it always made her smile. She reached a well-polished boot across the threshold of the Evans’ doorway and straightened up the rug. A little unusual, perhaps, for a Muggle-born child to be quite so excited, but… who knew? Maybe the girl had already made friends in the magic world; if her parents were open-minded that wasn’t impossible. Or maybe the Evans family had witches and wizards in their outer branches and Albus simply hadn’t seen fit to inform her of that fact. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t done similar things before.
***
Severus stands in the kitchen doorway and for the first time sees his life through Lily’s eyes. And as he stands there a realisation crystallises in his mind that some things just aren’t supposed to happen.
He watches, hollow, as his father hits her again; watches as she stands with pathetic, petrified pride and refuses to cry out. The sound of fists on flesh is oddly loud. Bone cracks.
Tobias Snape notices his son and his rage splinters into noise. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT YOU SCRAWNY WHORESON!’
Severus turns away.
Another thing crystallises.
He’s never going to hurt someone the way his father does. He’s never going to hurt Lily.
***
When they were thirteen everything began to change. It wasn’t the physical stuff, so much, since as far as both of them were concerned that was by-the-by and, besides, neither of them were completely oblivious of The Way The World Worked. No, it wasn’t that so much as the other, smaller things. Petunia, for example - she’d gone and gotten herself a part-time job and, for the first time in her life, was too busy to follow them around like Lily’s second shadow. And, after the years at Hogwarts, most of Lily’s Muggle school friends had practically forgotten her, and it wasn’t as though Severus had ever had many to start with. Sure, the pair of them had always existed in some kind of closed-off little universe of their own but suddenly the population was down to Two with a capital letter on the front of the word and, anyway, together they were gaining a new kind of perspective of the world. Not outcasts so much, they told themselves, as mavericks, or something better, something above and beyond the usual riff-raff who didn’t bother to think in anything even resembling a straight line. Although that might be a misrepresentation, that might make them sound arrogant, when it wasn’t about arrogance, it was about difference and-
By fourteen the philosophies of it all didn’t matter anymore either way. They just were.
***
It was summer and the air was thin with heat. Tobias Snape was tramping along the edge of the road. At times he stomped along the tarmac. Other times he strayed onto the brittle, blonde grass by the wayside. Either way his boots fell and rose with a steady rhythm, matching the machinations of his brain as his thoughts played the customary after-work sonata of the mill and the budget and the union bosses. It was the same route he’d been walking for at least ten years and he was so accustomed to it that there was hardly a reason to even keep his eyes open to traverse it. If he had been a more imaginative soul, he might have played with the idea that his boots would have been able to find their own way by now, without him. But Tobias Snape wasn’t really that kind of man, which was, perhaps, at least partly the reason why he was so startled to find his thoughts interrupted that particular afternoon by the sound of girlish laughter slipping like a spanner into the cogs of his thoughts. He paused inside his mind and then his boots came to a halt too, as he glanced up through the thick warm air to find the owner’s laughter, as though he half expected to find her standing in front of him and he the source of her amusement. His narrowed eyes followed the sound, which lead him across the crunchiness of the dry grass towards a sharp, crumbling drop where the earth gave way to the muddy river below.
Just look at her.
Tobias knew with that if he had had a daughter like that, she would under no uncertain terms have been allowed out on her own. The girl stood in the water, up to her hips, with the ebb and swell of the river shifting the skirt of her summer frock backwards and forwards like seaweed in the ocean. Damp curls of red hair were escaping from her hat as she continued to laugh, completely ignorant of the fact that she now had an audience.
‘Oh, come on, Severus, don’t be such a girl about it! A little bit of water never killed anyone!’
Tobias’s greying eyebrows made a small jump northwards as he noticed for the boy for the first time. The boy, who was sitting stiffly on the riverbank, a little to the right of Tobias’s line of vision, watching the girl with an unashamedly greedy expression on his face. The boy who looked so very much like his damned, nagging mother. Tobias frowned.
‘Haven’t you ever heard of drowning?’ Severus whined. ‘I can’t swim.’
‘Look, I’ll hold your hands! It’s not deep here, really, and the current isn’t very swift. Come on…’
Go on, then, Tobias willed the lad from where he stood, on the bank, like some overlord-surveyor in dirty overalls. Be a man, be a son a fellow could be proud of for once in your miserable life.
But the boy didn’t.
The girl rolled her eyes at him and waded out deeper to swim, the sundress billowing around her like the skirts of some water creature, and Tobias Snape walked off resenting, as always, the pathetic hand that he felt life had dealt him.
***
Lily has that cranky set to her shoulders, the one she always gets when he’s done something to annoy her. Half of the time Severus usually doesn’t know what it is that he’s done, but today he does. And he looks at her slender back and the damp curls of her hair, and he looks at the river, and he steps forwards.
‘Lily.’ Not a plea, not a protestation, not even a request, although…
She turns and sees him and the grumpiness vanishes as a smile brightens her face.
‘The hand’s still on offer,’ she murmurs.
He reaches out and takes it.
***
When they were fifteen it all became fully clear, like the settling of brilliant colours at the base of a kaleidoscope. She was laying on the ground between the trees and he’d entered the clearing quietly, startled deep down like he always was to find waiting for him exactly like she’d said she would.
‘Peaches,’ he announced by way of greeting, as though it were the declaration of the century.
Lily opened her eyes and looked up at him through the matching green sunlight. ‘Eh?’
‘Peaches,’ he repeated, and plonked himself down beside her. He fished a peach out from the brown paper bag he’d brought them in and held it up over her head for her inspection. She laughed because he was holding it too close for her to focus on, then reached up and moved his hand backwards with her fingers clasped around his wrist. She could feel the fine bones above his hand, like birds’ bones.
‘Where on earth did you get peaches?’ She breathed in the scent of them, inhaling deeply.
He shrugged in that way of his that meant don’t-ask-please-you-won’t-approve-and-I-don’t-want-to-argue. After a second’s thought she decided that the day was too lovely, too early-summer, too green-sunlight, to be bothered with an argument either way, so she took mercy on his expression, and accepted the peach with her free hand. First bite told her that it was as lovely as it smelt.
‘You forgot to let go of my hand,’ he said, and then rather wished that he hadn’t.
Lily raised her eyebrows slightly, and smiled with her mouth half full. ‘Who says I forgot?’
Severus looked from her hand to her face with an expression so intense that she could hardly focus on it any better than when she’d tried focusing on the peach and then he reached out his thumb and wiped peach juice from her chin. Lily swallowed her mouthful and looked back at him. He seemed incapable of moving. She put the peach in her lap, completely unfazed by the complaints that her mother would no doubt later have if it stained somehow and then, through some inordinately complicated and yet oh-so-simple process that neither of them fully understood, she was kissing him. And he was kissing her. And with the scent of the peaches and the dry leaves and the green sunlight, there’d never been anything that made more sense.
***
The word had just slipped from him. He hadn’t meant to say it, Merlin only knows that had been the last thing he’d dreamt of doing. He couldn’t remember even thinking it, not consciously at any rate, not with Lily as the context, not since that first day when they’d met. He can remember that day as though it were yesterday and he knows that he loved her even then. Knows he loves her still, so how could something so stupid slip from his mouth? And how… how could she stay so angry?
The portrait door remains shut and a fear he hasn’t felt since he was a child swells back up inside him. He’s done it. He’s turned into his father.
He’s hurt Lily.
***
Lost, oh Merlin she’s never felt so lost. The anger runs from her, like blood from her fingertips, as the awareness of the things she’s just done - the things she’s just said - hits her with the force of a Bludger. And to be even thinking about Bludgers, her, Lily Evans, even as metaphors, proves how much her brain is screaming. The shock hits and Lily realises that she’s standing in the Gryffindor common room with her hands clutching, white-knuckled, at the thick material of her dressing gown, and that a few late-nighters are gazing at her curiously from over their textbooks and card games.
Mary looking suitably content. Perhaps it might have all just continued if it hadn’t been for Mary, actually. It had been Mary who’d crowed about ‘that Snape threatening to sleep in the corridor’ and well, really, that had been the last straw as far as Lily had been concerned, but to see Mary now, looking so darn pleased about the argument that they must have all heard even through the Fat Lady’s portrait, well-
‘Oh, Merlin,’ murmured Lily and the shock dripped from her even as she span on the spot and flung the portrait back open. ‘Oh, Merlin, oh - Sev, wait, wait!’
He almost didn’t stop at the sound of her voice calling at him from the other end of the hall. He almost didn’t. But he did. He did, and he concluded that he’d officially lost all comprehension of witchkind as he watched her run towards him, like something from one of his sentimental grandmother’s black and white Muggle films, with the cord of her dressing gown trailing behind her, her nightie gleaming a yellow-gold, and her face damp as she pressed it against his chest and threw her arms around him.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I mean, I did, but I didn’t, all at the same time, and I don’t want you to hate me for it, Sev, I don’t.’
He would have told her that he hadn’t meant it either, but then, that had already been said, and right at that moment he wasn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to speak either way. Instead he just held her. It was all going to be okay.
Because it was them. And they just were.
Author: jenwryn
Recipient: lavinialavender
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~3,000
Warnings: Some mild coarse language; wanders around canon nervously.
Summary: Told mostly from Lily’s PoV, this story presents a series of moments from Lily and Severus’s relationship. Swinging between childhood and adolescence, Hogwarts and summer holidays, happiness and not-so-happiness, together they weave a story of friendship and love.
Author's Notes: I really did intend to avoid angst, but my muse is to angst as bees are to honey - but, at the very least, I’ve attempted to make it hopeful honey! It’s a little experimental (at least for me), which is probably not the smartest thing to do for a Fic Exchange, but my muse has had to work overtime on this one, what with Real Life baying at the door, and she seems to work her weirdest under pressure. Either way, I do hope lavinialavender enjoys it. That’s the main thing."
Observations Unobserved
I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love
I don’t know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you…
~ George Harrison, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, 1968.
***
Lily Evans sat in the library at Hogwarts and wished that they were allowed to fling the windows open. It wasn’t as though there weren’t enough windows. There were, more than enough. Windows encircled the massive booked space, punctuating shelves and desk nooks like smeared arches of warm, coloured light. But none of them were open, not a single pane of glass was pushed aside or upwards to let in even the smallest gasp of air. Of course, the stuff outside was probably still hanging limp and motionless like it had been at lunch time, but surely even that couldn’t be as bad as the stale nothingness within the library. Gone was the dusky, sweet smell of old books that Lily so loved, lost and hidden, as it were, beneath the heatwave. Instead the air tasted faintly metallic and she was continuously distracted by the way the sweat, dull and sticky, was gluing her hair in lank, red strands against her neck. She used her quill to lift it from her skin and the dark ink that dripped against her felt cool to the touch.
It wasn’t supposed to be this hot. There were averages and norms when it came to the weather, but the year was ignoring them all. It’s a fine one for the record books, their Herbology professor kept declaring, drizzling water from his wand onto rows of wilting plants with a grim expression lurking behind his ginger moustache. Hogwarts is in the north, for the love of Merlin.
Lily didn’t want to even imagine what it would like be when summer officially arrived. Worse, when summer officially arrived and she had to head home, head south, head back down towards the industrialised heat and swelter of the Muggle world. She didn’t like thinking about going home at the best of times. Not that she didn’t adore seeing her family - she did, truly. But not a scrap of magic for that many weeks? Ehe.
In fact, the only decent thing about it would be having Severus all to herself and no-one to find it strange.
***
Fear, fear, fear. A small boy beneath starched sheets, knees drawn to chin, immobile, hands clasped over ears yet straining to hear every sound, every shout, every sob, from the kitchen below - and outside, a storm rages black.
Rage, rage, rage, His father bellows and his mother is dissolving into incoherence, no, no, not my boy you bastard, not my Severus, vent your spleen on someone else, and her scream of pain cuts white through night as he does exactly that.
Nerves, nerves, nerves. A grown lad sits in a schoolroom, worn boots against stone, head towards a book, and glances sideways now and then at a certain flip of red hair, trying to work out if her affectionate words are more real than his father.
***
‘You’re Muggle-born, so someone from the school will have to come and explain it to your parents…’
Severus’s words bounced like an excited terrier inside Lily’s head as she stared in amazement at the woman standing outside their front door. Not a woman, Lily corrected herself with delight in Severus’s voice, but a witch. Oh, if Sev were here right now she’d hug him silly! It’s all real, it’s all real, we get to go to school together and be magic… The stranger was smiling at her with amused interest, looking both at Lily and somehow past her as well, down the hall, as though trying to decide whether Lily’s parents were actually at home.
‘You must be Lily Evans, am I correct?’ said the witch - for it was more of a statement than a question. ‘I’m here to see your mother and father, dear. I do believe that a letter from the school ought to already have arriv-’
Minerva McGonagall never had the chance to finish her sentence because Lily span on the spot, making the hall rug entwine in itself like the curl atop a cone of softened ice-cream and, almost tripping, the child raced off down the hall into the cool shadows of the backrooms, screeching, ‘Mum! Mum! It’s just like I said, it is, you have to come! Come quickly, Mum! It’s a lady from Hogwarts!’
It wasn’t the first time Minerva had seen a similar reaction, though it always made her smile. She reached a well-polished boot across the threshold of the Evans’ doorway and straightened up the rug. A little unusual, perhaps, for a Muggle-born child to be quite so excited, but… who knew? Maybe the girl had already made friends in the magic world; if her parents were open-minded that wasn’t impossible. Or maybe the Evans family had witches and wizards in their outer branches and Albus simply hadn’t seen fit to inform her of that fact. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t done similar things before.
***
Severus stands in the kitchen doorway and for the first time sees his life through Lily’s eyes. And as he stands there a realisation crystallises in his mind that some things just aren’t supposed to happen.
He watches, hollow, as his father hits her again; watches as she stands with pathetic, petrified pride and refuses to cry out. The sound of fists on flesh is oddly loud. Bone cracks.
Tobias Snape notices his son and his rage splinters into noise. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT YOU SCRAWNY WHORESON!’
Severus turns away.
Another thing crystallises.
He’s never going to hurt someone the way his father does. He’s never going to hurt Lily.
***
When they were thirteen everything began to change. It wasn’t the physical stuff, so much, since as far as both of them were concerned that was by-the-by and, besides, neither of them were completely oblivious of The Way The World Worked. No, it wasn’t that so much as the other, smaller things. Petunia, for example - she’d gone and gotten herself a part-time job and, for the first time in her life, was too busy to follow them around like Lily’s second shadow. And, after the years at Hogwarts, most of Lily’s Muggle school friends had practically forgotten her, and it wasn’t as though Severus had ever had many to start with. Sure, the pair of them had always existed in some kind of closed-off little universe of their own but suddenly the population was down to Two with a capital letter on the front of the word and, anyway, together they were gaining a new kind of perspective of the world. Not outcasts so much, they told themselves, as mavericks, or something better, something above and beyond the usual riff-raff who didn’t bother to think in anything even resembling a straight line. Although that might be a misrepresentation, that might make them sound arrogant, when it wasn’t about arrogance, it was about difference and-
By fourteen the philosophies of it all didn’t matter anymore either way. They just were.
***
It was summer and the air was thin with heat. Tobias Snape was tramping along the edge of the road. At times he stomped along the tarmac. Other times he strayed onto the brittle, blonde grass by the wayside. Either way his boots fell and rose with a steady rhythm, matching the machinations of his brain as his thoughts played the customary after-work sonata of the mill and the budget and the union bosses. It was the same route he’d been walking for at least ten years and he was so accustomed to it that there was hardly a reason to even keep his eyes open to traverse it. If he had been a more imaginative soul, he might have played with the idea that his boots would have been able to find their own way by now, without him. But Tobias Snape wasn’t really that kind of man, which was, perhaps, at least partly the reason why he was so startled to find his thoughts interrupted that particular afternoon by the sound of girlish laughter slipping like a spanner into the cogs of his thoughts. He paused inside his mind and then his boots came to a halt too, as he glanced up through the thick warm air to find the owner’s laughter, as though he half expected to find her standing in front of him and he the source of her amusement. His narrowed eyes followed the sound, which lead him across the crunchiness of the dry grass towards a sharp, crumbling drop where the earth gave way to the muddy river below.
Just look at her.
Tobias knew with that if he had had a daughter like that, she would under no uncertain terms have been allowed out on her own. The girl stood in the water, up to her hips, with the ebb and swell of the river shifting the skirt of her summer frock backwards and forwards like seaweed in the ocean. Damp curls of red hair were escaping from her hat as she continued to laugh, completely ignorant of the fact that she now had an audience.
‘Oh, come on, Severus, don’t be such a girl about it! A little bit of water never killed anyone!’
Tobias’s greying eyebrows made a small jump northwards as he noticed for the boy for the first time. The boy, who was sitting stiffly on the riverbank, a little to the right of Tobias’s line of vision, watching the girl with an unashamedly greedy expression on his face. The boy who looked so very much like his damned, nagging mother. Tobias frowned.
‘Haven’t you ever heard of drowning?’ Severus whined. ‘I can’t swim.’
‘Look, I’ll hold your hands! It’s not deep here, really, and the current isn’t very swift. Come on…’
Go on, then, Tobias willed the lad from where he stood, on the bank, like some overlord-surveyor in dirty overalls. Be a man, be a son a fellow could be proud of for once in your miserable life.
But the boy didn’t.
The girl rolled her eyes at him and waded out deeper to swim, the sundress billowing around her like the skirts of some water creature, and Tobias Snape walked off resenting, as always, the pathetic hand that he felt life had dealt him.
***
Lily has that cranky set to her shoulders, the one she always gets when he’s done something to annoy her. Half of the time Severus usually doesn’t know what it is that he’s done, but today he does. And he looks at her slender back and the damp curls of her hair, and he looks at the river, and he steps forwards.
‘Lily.’ Not a plea, not a protestation, not even a request, although…
She turns and sees him and the grumpiness vanishes as a smile brightens her face.
‘The hand’s still on offer,’ she murmurs.
He reaches out and takes it.
***
When they were fifteen it all became fully clear, like the settling of brilliant colours at the base of a kaleidoscope. She was laying on the ground between the trees and he’d entered the clearing quietly, startled deep down like he always was to find waiting for him exactly like she’d said she would.
‘Peaches,’ he announced by way of greeting, as though it were the declaration of the century.
Lily opened her eyes and looked up at him through the matching green sunlight. ‘Eh?’
‘Peaches,’ he repeated, and plonked himself down beside her. He fished a peach out from the brown paper bag he’d brought them in and held it up over her head for her inspection. She laughed because he was holding it too close for her to focus on, then reached up and moved his hand backwards with her fingers clasped around his wrist. She could feel the fine bones above his hand, like birds’ bones.
‘Where on earth did you get peaches?’ She breathed in the scent of them, inhaling deeply.
He shrugged in that way of his that meant don’t-ask-please-you-won’t-approve-and-I-don’t-want-to-argue. After a second’s thought she decided that the day was too lovely, too early-summer, too green-sunlight, to be bothered with an argument either way, so she took mercy on his expression, and accepted the peach with her free hand. First bite told her that it was as lovely as it smelt.
‘You forgot to let go of my hand,’ he said, and then rather wished that he hadn’t.
Lily raised her eyebrows slightly, and smiled with her mouth half full. ‘Who says I forgot?’
Severus looked from her hand to her face with an expression so intense that she could hardly focus on it any better than when she’d tried focusing on the peach and then he reached out his thumb and wiped peach juice from her chin. Lily swallowed her mouthful and looked back at him. He seemed incapable of moving. She put the peach in her lap, completely unfazed by the complaints that her mother would no doubt later have if it stained somehow and then, through some inordinately complicated and yet oh-so-simple process that neither of them fully understood, she was kissing him. And he was kissing her. And with the scent of the peaches and the dry leaves and the green sunlight, there’d never been anything that made more sense.
***
The word had just slipped from him. He hadn’t meant to say it, Merlin only knows that had been the last thing he’d dreamt of doing. He couldn’t remember even thinking it, not consciously at any rate, not with Lily as the context, not since that first day when they’d met. He can remember that day as though it were yesterday and he knows that he loved her even then. Knows he loves her still, so how could something so stupid slip from his mouth? And how… how could she stay so angry?
The portrait door remains shut and a fear he hasn’t felt since he was a child swells back up inside him. He’s done it. He’s turned into his father.
He’s hurt Lily.
***
Lost, oh Merlin she’s never felt so lost. The anger runs from her, like blood from her fingertips, as the awareness of the things she’s just done - the things she’s just said - hits her with the force of a Bludger. And to be even thinking about Bludgers, her, Lily Evans, even as metaphors, proves how much her brain is screaming. The shock hits and Lily realises that she’s standing in the Gryffindor common room with her hands clutching, white-knuckled, at the thick material of her dressing gown, and that a few late-nighters are gazing at her curiously from over their textbooks and card games.
Mary looking suitably content. Perhaps it might have all just continued if it hadn’t been for Mary, actually. It had been Mary who’d crowed about ‘that Snape threatening to sleep in the corridor’ and well, really, that had been the last straw as far as Lily had been concerned, but to see Mary now, looking so darn pleased about the argument that they must have all heard even through the Fat Lady’s portrait, well-
‘Oh, Merlin,’ murmured Lily and the shock dripped from her even as she span on the spot and flung the portrait back open. ‘Oh, Merlin, oh - Sev, wait, wait!’
He almost didn’t stop at the sound of her voice calling at him from the other end of the hall. He almost didn’t. But he did. He did, and he concluded that he’d officially lost all comprehension of witchkind as he watched her run towards him, like something from one of his sentimental grandmother’s black and white Muggle films, with the cord of her dressing gown trailing behind her, her nightie gleaming a yellow-gold, and her face damp as she pressed it against his chest and threw her arms around him.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I mean, I did, but I didn’t, all at the same time, and I don’t want you to hate me for it, Sev, I don’t.’
He would have told her that he hadn’t meant it either, but then, that had already been said, and right at that moment he wasn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to speak either way. Instead he just held her. It was all going to be okay.
Because it was them. And they just were.