bakerstreet | a softer meme

Severus is standing in a Tesco's nearest the return address on the card he received; Mr and Mrs Evans' new residence, the family having sensibly moved further from the dwindling hellscape of Cokeworth some time ago. He isn't sure when. He also isn't sure how they heard the news - obituary, maybe, though he can't imagine why they'd be reading them. Or why they'd care. They had left a thoughtful card and a pudding in a glass baking dish with their sincere condolences about Eileen.

He does believe their sincerity. They're just that sort of people.

It's only, Tobias had broken the baking dish, and Severus couldn't stand to be in there another second. He should have just charmed the thing back together but he couldn't, didn't, merely left. Now he's standing here, in the cookery gadgets aisle, trying to remember what the fuck the glass baking dish looked like over the more consuming thoughts. Which are: how he's going to kill his father. It's a calm, cold determination. Nothing for it. Maybe if he hadn't finished school and come back to this, but—

His spine stiffens, derailed entirely, catching the sight of red hair out of the corner of one eye. He doesn't turn.

Even at a young age, Lily was something of a little old lady in her daily routines, preferring to be home and settled in for the night by a hard ten o’clock at the very latest. Some of her workmates at St Mungo’s didn’t understand her polite refusals to join them for pints after work or be tempted out for an evening on the town. Lily was just the sort of person who, despite their noble bravado at times, liked to be at home with a good book and a cup of tea - with very few exceptions.

Frozen pizza, sometimes, proved to be a worthy exception.

There’s something about existing with one foot in the wizarding world and one foot in the Muggle world that gives a person an odd approach to life. During her time at home between terms, she hadn’t been permitted to use magic until she’d come of age, and after she had left Hogwarts for a promising career in London using magic while she visited her parents never crossed her mind. It wasn’t that Mr. and Mrs. Evans would mind their daughter taking a more expedient, magical route to pizza, but she had gotten so used to not using magic in their presence that it seemed perfectly reasonable to physically drive herself to the Tesco to buy a frozen pizza that would then be heated up (in regular time) in an oven.

It was that urge that brought her through the door of Tesco’s that night, absently humming along with the song playing on the overhead system. She was home for the long weekend and while her parents tucked in earlier and earlier the older they grew, Lily was still restless and peckish enough to pop down to the shops.

The route to the frozen section was straightforward enough that there should be no reason for a detour, and she wouldn’t have taken one if she hadn’t caught sight of a profile too distinguished to belong to anyone else. Without much thought she veered down another aisle, looking back the way she had come in astonishment as she hovered by a display of lozenges.

Lily thought of Sev often in varying degrees of fondness or anger depending on the day. She had given consideration to what she would say or do on the occasion that their paths crossed once more, had held imaginary conversations with him at random over the course of years, but she had never done anything more than that.

For all those pretend discussions - none of them had ever been held in a Tesco.

Caught between not wanting to let the moment pass by, and wanting to forget this had happened and spend the night eating pizza in peace Lily compromised with herself, first getting the pizza, and then returning to where she had spotted him, hoping that she hadn’t taken too long, even if the want did make her want to kick herself a little.

“Tesco crockery? You also struck me as the Waitrose type.” Holding her pizza like a large book tucked beneath one arm she lingered at the end of the aisle, not sure if she should be doing this, but letting it happen all the same. “Distinguished, oddly classy,” she added, instantly wishing the floor would swallow her up.

I thought you moved to London

—nope, too much like a stalker

I figured this was where your parents shopped

—absolutely not, more like a stalker and potentially insulting, even though she's here?

I didn't think you'd be here

—holy shit think of something that doesn't sound psychotic.

Severus doesn't say anything. He stares at the rows of pans and frowns, even though it's very obvious that his attention is on her. He looks ridiculous, wearing a cardigan that may have been black at some point but has faded into grey after years of use, and some ancient Jefferson Airplane t-shirt. (Always a bit of a prick about music. The politically agonized acid rock and baleful folk art of the Americas, struggling through the Vietnam War, speaks to him more than contemporary British whinging.)

"I'm too poor for Waitrose," sounds like a joke, and also like he's fumbling it, arms crossing over his chest in a way that telegraphs more insecurity than hostility. Finally his gaze darts to hers. "I thought - I'd heard you were in London."

Ah, fuck.

However awkward in its delivery, the attempt at joke rendered the barest trace of a laugh from Lily - who was still unsure where she should look at that moment. It was almost embarrassing, in a way, to have given so much thought to a thing only to have it happen and have those thoughts fly out of the window. She had wondered after him through the lenses of so many different emotions over the course of years, and there, confronted with it Lily had no idea where to look first. She was almost grateful for the pang of surprise he conjured when he mentioned her move to London, so much so that in lieu of all the questions she might ask she nodded.

“I am, I moved not too long ago, for work.” Later. She would ask him about how he knew that later, provided there was a later of course.

“You? Cokeworth, or,” Pausing her eyes finally rest on him, taking in his profile for a moment that drew out to the point where it could have bordered on intentional. Maybe it was, but most of the time Lily wasn’t the sort to be shrewd instead of gentle.

“Moved on to better things?” This wasn’t most times, though the conclusion to that question surprised even her. No matter how many times she had looked back, no matter how many different lights she held things under, trying to glean some understanding of where she could have helped, where it all went wrong - her feelings never stopped being hurt.

"Wiltshire," he says automatically, and then regrets it. Hopefully she'll associate it with the wizarding village near Stonehenge, and not the Malfoy estate. He tells himself there's no reason for her to know where the latter is, anyway, but he still tacks on: "For work. Research projects. For, uhm."

Smooth.

"Potions and counter-curses and things, I was trying to get an apprenticeship but they're all dreadful." And I'm being asked to go try for a spot at Hogwarts by a genocidal dictator, so there's that! That Severus is smarter than anyone who might give him a job can't be a surprise. He was always going to be in an odd position, for good or for ill.

Smalltalk feels suffocating. He looks at her for a moment, then back at the pans. He can't remember what it looked like.

"Eileen died."

She was quiet for a drawn out moment that stretched to the point where it began to be uncomfortable, looking from him to the pizza in her arms and back again.

"I know. I made the pudding." She had expressly told her parents to leave her off of the card, but she had sat up drinking coffee and baking well into the night after hearing the news. "I'm sorry."

He couldn't keep it all from her. She had spent too many years with him not to have pieced together something resembling a narrative of what his life was like when they hadn't been together as children.

There was another extended pause, she had been staring, but she either didn't realize it or didn't care that she was. It was hard to tell from the ponderous expression on her face.

In a tone that was cautious but wholeheartedly sincere, Lily spoke again, eyeing him hesitantly as if to try and make it clear that all wasn't forgiven. "Do you have time to sit in the park? It's a short walk away, we could buy terrible Tesco wine for the occasion."

She didn't know if wizards drank in public parks at night come to think of it. She hadn't ever known one it would have been appropriate to ask.

It's not like being dumbstruck by lightning. It's like simply shifting his arm to let the blow find his ribs, allowing it to land; he feels both gutted, and unsurprised. Because of course she did. Severus is quiet. His mouth tastes bitter, and he knows it's a psychosomatic response to the sudden desire to say something awful about it all, swallowed back by a better sense.

He is trying. To be better.

(Severus did not go to Lily in this life just like he did not go to her in another; he has gone to Dumbledore in both, I don't know what to do, he wants to recruit her, he thinks to use me, I can't, I can't—)

"The pan broke."

Sure, he'll go to the park with Lily Evans. Like they're friends. Anyway, his horrible father broke your casserole dish and it was too much to stay for another second to mend it, that's why he's here in the cookery aisle like a jackass.

"There are other pans."

She should have stopped talking and left ages ago before she offered to go get drunk in public on Tesco wine certainly, maybe even before she'd called him the Marks and Spencer type. Somewhere something - and maybe it was her and that infernal streak of compassionate streak that kept her soft in places where life should have hardened her - had gone off the rails.

Better to give him the chance to leave. It stood to reason that he might. He was nothing if not composed of thorns and sharp edges, all abrupt exits and cold words. Her hand rested on his shoulder briefly and she turned to walk away, towards the wine. He would follow, or he would leave. Whatever happened, it was nothing if not a pizza and wine sort of night, and it served her right for being a fool that the pizza would be a melted mess in the end.

(Her fingers on his shoulder, he imagines, leave a gold burning mark.)

Severus stares at the pans for a little while more, and then selects one nearly at random. The existence of other pans does not negate the fact that a soon-to-be dead muggle prick broke one that Lily put something in. (It would have been understandable, even excusable, for Severus to have done something in the heat of the moment when he found out. But he doesn't want that. He wants the cold nauseating reality, he wants bleak daylight. Not so much suffering. He just wants it to be real.)

Lily is selecting a bottle of wine, and Severus joins her. He is not much of a drinker - he has a poor palate for it (even despite Lucius constantly trying to test his vineyard's spoils on him) and doesn't like being drunk, but he'd probably chug real poison if she offered it to him.

More than the fact of her move to London, he had heard of her separation from Potter. He thought he'd have been happier; instead he was just even more angry. Severus observes the fall of her hair over her shoulder, and wonders what horrors were finally exposed to her. He knows best of all what kind of men Potter and Black are. It twists something cold in the pit of his stomach.

"Did you want anything else?" he asks her quietly.

An apology.

It doesn't come out. Of course it doesn't, it couldn't. His mother is dead and the look on his face would have been better suited for someone dragged behind a car to Tesco instead of driving there, and she can't make this be about that. For all the conversations she'd imagined them having, that apology, or the demand for one anyway, played a central role. He had thrown her off, appearing like this, the grudge she was inclined to stoke on occasion suddenly foisted to the backburner. His question had stoked a fire she was trying to keep cold.

It was too difficult to see him this sad. Anger didn't stand a chance - at least, not with Lily Evans, not right now.

"You came back," was what came out in place of that single demand that she felt she had all the right in the world to make. She had expected him to turn and disappear and that he hadn't made her chest tighten unexpectedly. If they had been normal people she would have hugged him - if she had been a normal person she wouldn't have said something as silly as that.

"No," Lily tacked on abruptly. "I don't want anything else." Blindly she reached for the nearest wine bottle on the shelf beside her, her eyes narrowing just slightly at the corners as she watched his face while she did so.

He would say: I gave you a hundred apologies and you told me you leave you alone, so I did.

Ickle Snivellus, who slept outside Gryffindor common room waiting for her to beg like a dog. Over the years he has felt self-righteous and ashamed of different things in turn, but that ordeal remains a special kind of personal hell. He had certain beliefs of the optics and the truths of it, back then. And he has certain - different - ones now.

None of it is easy or pretty. All of it is terrible.

"You asked."

Severus has been waiting for her to ask him to come back for a good while now. But he doesn't sound profound, he just sounds awkward. His face doesn't do anything when she picks a bottle. Once she does, they can head to the tills. He buys a fucking pan.

Sorries and apologies are neighbors, but they aren't the same thing.

He had done one without considering the weight of the other. She knew he was sorry his actions had driven her off. She knew he regretted that he didn't have her there, and it hurt to keep pushing him away but Lily had been aware then, as she was now, that he was sorry to the extent that it meant she was gone.

She was tired of the ugly secrets, she was tired of being left out of what gnawed at him, and she was tired of the way he just didn't seem to get it. He would keep her in the dark forever if she had stayed, and she didn't want that. Lily had learned a lot about what it meant to really be there for a person, and blindly sitting by with love and support was very honorable, but in the wake of so many unknowns, it wasn't helpful.

Here in Tesco however, it didn't matter all that much, at least not for now. For now, she was lost to the way her stomach dropped when he spoke and all the exhaustion and hurt on his face.

So he bought his pan, and she bought her mostly defrosted pizza and a bottle of wine that had cost more at the till than anticipated, and there was nothing left to do but walk the short distance to the park.

"Did you drive all the way to this Tesco to get a pan? Were you going to drop it off at my house?" Her questions were posed as she walked beside him on the sidewalk towards the park, engrossed in the task of trying to magically open a bottle of wine as discreetly as possible.

It is fortunate that these thoughts are only theoretical and not spoken aloud; if Severus knew she thought so deplorably of him, if she really believed him to be so selfish and unaware, it'd go a long way to keep him from following her to the park. Nothing will ever make him disregard her - she is permitted to hate him, think the worst of him, become fully deaf and blind to him, he wouldn't begrudge her those things - but he might not hold out his heart to have more pieces excised.

"I was going to drop it off."

He didn't drive. He doesn't drive, he doesn't have a car or a licence, though he knows how. Many a time as a child over summer holidays he had been required to move his father's vehicle from various places it had been abandoned; briefly his memory touches on one such time, entirely too young, picking Lily up in the rusted old thing just to laugh about it. Sold for parts, a year or two ago. Ostensibly for money to repair things in the house. (It went to liquor.)

He adds, "I thought it was just your parents' house. The address was on the sticker." Those custom ones, embossed nicely, bought from stationery shops in clunky rolls. You had moved to London, after all. "Didn't think to bother to post with it."

Or have their neighbours see an owl, or this, or that. In retrospect it was stupid. He should have ignored it, because now he realizes how insane he looks, like he was showing up just to get a glimpse of them. A mortified feeling coils in his stomach.

Maybe someday thoughts would bubble over into words, and maybe those words would have enough heat and poison in them to kill the grass they'd stand on to exchange them. For now, the evening air was chilly and Lily's hands found their way into the pockets of her coat, unsure of where to look as they walked towards the park.

"They do, it's strange to not think of where they live as where I live." Lily regretted saying it instantly knowing full well that he likely didn't share her sentiment, and even if he did this probably wasn't the time to bring it up. She hadn't quite gotten used to life alone after spending years in the dormitories of Hogwarts, and the rest of her time under her mother and father's roof. "Maybe it's because their house is so much nicer than my flat," Lily added quickly. It was honest, her flat was on the closet-sized side of things - but she still felt like the words sounded as though she were trying to atone for something.

It was almost a relief when the sign for the park's entrance appeared, motion providing a moment of distraction away from everything that hung in the air around her, and between them. Lily turned almost too sharply, the soles of her shoes crunching on grassy gravel as she looked over at him, frowning. "Do you make it out to London much?" Lily's hand reached out absently, landing on his for only a moment before drawing away to head in the direction of a few picnic tables. Walking ahead only to come to a stop and begin unboxing her pizza

Wand in hand there was a quietly muttered spell before a handful of flames appeared in her slightly cupped hand, sitting down before using the Levitation Spell to make the pizza hover above the fire she held. "This is the trickier part, can you sort of, nudge it so it has a bit of spin over the fire?"

Her parents are lovely people, why shouldn't she want to be with them? Severus understands keeping company when you actually like it. He doesn't live alone, still, more than half the time. Not that being Malfoy-adjacent is anything to brag about in front of Lily Evans, but they are the only people who've ever cared enough to make sure he didn't have to go back to Spinner's End.

(Funny, all these well-meaning teachers and professors and so-called heroic wizards and witches, even his own head of house, turning a blind eye either because it would require mingling with that in-between world of mixed families or apathy that it was happening to a poor, ugly Slytherin. Did they think he deserved it?)

She touches his hand and all he can do is think What the fuck is happening.

Severus is quiet for a while, holding his silence awkwardly, letting her fuss with the pizza and neglecting to answer about London. Sometimes he does. But he doesn't want to say so, and find himself in some weird trap where she then asks him if he's ever creepily shopped at her local grocery store there. What a bloody idiot he is. And so he just thinks about floating flowers, when they were children, and the pizza spins slowly and steadily without him having to do or say anything.

It looks incredibly silly.

There's the slightest spark of amusement and recognition in her eyes as it began to rotate without any obvious effort on his behalf. It's a weird, bittersweet feeling, one that almost made her wish she could be frank with him. She had walked away that day making peace with the notion that they would be strangers from that moment on, a bitter pill more easily grappled with when she was spurred on by the heat of her anger.

She could never stay that angry though. The fire of it ebbed away and left remorse and ash behind; Lily didn't regret telling him off and storming away, he had deserved that much for what he said, but that she had let that bridge burn as long as she had, had closed herself off to him, and leaned into things that made it easier to put it all behind her. Lily had been so certain that it was for the best at first, but over time there was room for doubt.

Her gaze lifted from the pizza she was baking from beneath long enough to glance in his direction, those doubts seeming to jump and bristle inside her at the sight of him.

Lily wanted to say so much to him. She wanted to ask if the choices he'd made had brought him anything close to the peace of mind he hadn't had when they were younger, she wanted to know what new things he'd come up with magically speaking, and how his potions were coming along. She missed knowing, she missed her friend.

"If you do end up in London sometime you could come around for tea if you like." For what felt like the hundredth time that night her mouth had made the decisions for her and let spill things that were closer to what she wanted, rather than what she knew to be prudent and sensible.

Come around for tea.

The spinning pizza spell (what a world, what a world) does not collapse in on itself, but it does buckle slightly; causing a wobble, a sharp interruption in whatever concentration it requires out of Severus to work. He doesn't say anything right away. He stands there for a long moment, not answering, not looking at her.

When he does—

He doesn't. It's a start and a stop, an aborted almost-word, and a step back. Nearly pacing, clearly agitated. The look he gives her is somewhat angry, but mostly just hurt.

"You asked me to leave you alone and I respected that," he says, his voice tense and stilted in a way she'll have never heard it. He was awkward and trembling when he was younger; by the time he slipped away one summer to be remade by the devil, she had sent him away, and so she does not know the young man who is no longer prone to flinching. There is control in him now, and in a way, it's horrible. "What are you doing?"

There's so much in his voice, and it was her turn for the hold she had on the pizza to waver for a moment, the flame in her cupped palm guttering briefly before brightening up again. Lily maintained her silence, watching the pizza as it continued to rotate. though its rotation was somewhat more off-kilter than it had been before.

What was she doing?

There was a hole where he had once fit. How many times had they laughed together? How many things had he taught her? She had been so angry for so long, and that anger had filled that hole for a long time. It was easy to leave it to simmer, but the fire had guttered out with time, and with experience.

"I was wrong to have stayed away for this long, and," Lily swallowed, her head tilted to the side as she looked off to the side for a long moment, the events of the last few years playing back through her mind. "I regret it," she added finally, her eyes shifting back towards him again. "I don't know how I'm meant to begin setting it back to rights, or if it can be. We've both come into lives of our own, as it should be. We're not children anymore."

Exhaling, Lily looked back at the pizza, annoyed that she had begun this process in the first place, but far too close to having completed it to quit - as if she had ever been capable of leaving any project no matter how small unfinished. "If you wanted to talk to me sometime, I want to talk to you. You could come for tea, we could talk." Even if, after tonight, Lily wouldn't have been that surprised if he never wanted to talk to her again.

"Why on earth do you regret it?"

Bafflement easily streaks through his obvious hurt, the look he gives her plainly confused and at least halfway sceptical. Like he doesn't really believe that, even though he's so good at telling when someone's lying to him. He doesn't get that impression and yet—

And yet it doesn't make any sense to him.

"You were right about me. Completely. I wanted you to be my friend and I also wanted to have other friends. Like you were allowed to have. Like everyone else was, except me. Do you know how impossible of a situation that was for a child? Expecting me to not only understand any difference at all between my friends who were mean sometimes, and your friends who beat the living hell out of me every moment they could, but also pick your friends?"

He shakes his head, agitated, just one quick movement. "Of course I understand now. And of course I understand that you were in a worse-off spot. I don't blame you. But I still am who I am, Lily. That's my world, because they don't hate me there."

"I didn't say I was wrong, nor was I worse off – only that," Lily looked at the pizza, scowling. "There were things I could have noticed, had I looked hard enough, had I not let myself stay that angry for that long that not looking was easy." In hindsight, Lily had learned just now unfortunate it was to be full of vitriol and convinced that there was no other way to look at a thing than the way one already was.

"I never expected us to have a conversation different than this one, not if I'm being honest but it ought to have come sooner. I hate them for what they did to you, and my falling in with them was like I was consenting to it and that is the wrong thing." Oh, the unfathomable compassion of Lily Evans. Even when she was right, even when someone else was wrong, there was a way to handle it that it didn't have to be any more barbed with pain than it needed to be. His compliance had also been consent, as was the horrible word he'd used against her in the heat of the moment. In their own ways, they had both betrayed one another to varying degrees.

She sighed, her eyes darting up to watch him, taking in his face and trying to read the seemingly countless little micro-expressions that served as clues to what lay beneath his exterior. "It's your world," Lily repeated the words, nodding in resignation. "I wouldn't try to change that." She closed her hand, guiding the pizza onto the box and setting it aside before she rose, arms crossing over her middle, her jaw tight. "I want to figure out how to talk to you again, if you want to do the same, tea seemed like a good beginning."

Tragic is the fact that Severus' belief in Lily being right is born of the same self-loathing that leaves him so angry in the first place. Was she right? Maybe. Maybe not. Children are cruel, and Lily placed her feeling of safety above his own. The likely truth is that there is no right answer for such a situation, which was unfair to them both; every adult failed them, leaving children their own devices, and letting a war enter their lives when they should have been protected.

It is too nuanced a truth for Severus, presently. Perhaps someday.

"Should I be flattered, that it took Potter leaving you to finally want to speak to me again?"

An extremely unkind thing to say, which is why he says it. He wants very badly to reconnect with her, but he also very badly wants to protect her. If they're friends again, will he be able to? She's safest when she's further away. How hard will she fight his own awfulness? Is what she remembers worth it?

Please, he thinks, though he doesn't know which outcome he even prefers, anymore.

"That's a terrible thing to say," a part of her that was just beginning to crackle with the slightest current of annoyance wanted to tack on that it was absurd to think James had done the leaving and not the other way around. How very dare.

How many times had Severus listened to her gently admonish him for how cold he could be about, well, nearly anything he put his mind to? This time however that soft kindness is missing from her voice, and instead Lily just sounded weary.

"What would you have liked me to say?" Her tone gained a touch of heat as she continued to frown up at him.

"How, and more importantly, where and when would you have preferred I try to speak with you?" Lily knew she could have written, but the right words were as absent every time she tried as they were now, sitting in a park in the dark. For all her brilliance within the sphere of academia, she became almost stupid and clumsy when confronted with how many facets there were to how she felt about Severus and the friendship that had been lost. There were so many new complications, so many things that had gone wrong, and to her credit, she had rolled with them as best as she could; with James and just how horribly ugly he could be (and her lingering disgust with herself at her blindness to it), with the Order and the growing threat of danger that made it hard to breathe at times, with being really, truly, on her own. "You don't have to come for tea, I'd like it if you did. I'm not trying to flatter you, I don't know how to fix anything but," Lily trailed off and looked up at him. Whatever annoyance she had felt had evaporated and weariness took its place once more. "Talking's a place to start," she finished finally.

a softer meme

as close as we get to cheating death;

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeClOcKU8AAzZzI.jpg

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