bakerstreet | a softer meme

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a softer meme

a softer world meme

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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.

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