Author's Note: This story is written for Round 2 of QLFC Season 5. I'm Beater #2 for the Falmouth Falcons, and for this round, I had to write a story about Spinner's End. (I took some liberty with this technically being the entire street, though the story is still centred around the house we're all thinking of).
Optional prompts: 4. (image) . and 9. (word) past. Word count: ~1650.
Janice Devereaux's entire world began and ended on Spinner's End. Born days after England declared war Germany, she spent her younger years curled against her mother in a house that would never withstand the bombs that were threatened to drop nearly every day. Their old walls were only supported by walls of their connected neighbours. Janice never remembered these times, though. By her sixth birthday, the world was a different, more hopeful place. She grew up with freedom, independence, and dreams. Her sick and widowed mother would have pushed her out of Spinner's End, out of Cokeworth, out of England if she could.
How, then, had Janice found her way back, passing by her childhood home in the centre of Spinner's End on her walk back from work? Why did her only key fit perfectly in the little hole of the door knob of the second to last house on that dusty street? When did her dreams of America fade away?
Love, the culprit of all sorrows, tied her down to this street, wrapped a ring around her finger, then drowned itself in music and opium. In just twenty years, Janice had grown into her now deceased mother: a widow without the education for a well-paying job and, therefore, without the funds to treat the ache in her chest. The only difference between them, beside one living and the other dead, was that Janice had no daughter to make a better life for. It was only her. Only her and the cramped house that felt both too large and too small at the same time. Only her and the empty spaces left by her husband that took up what little room the odd corners and cramped shelves did not.
Janice still considered herself to be a happy and normal person, content to continue her life and walk along Spinner's End every morning and back again every evening. She had already faded into the grey air of Cokeworth, a Jane Doe with little impact on the world.
Then the baby arrived. Not her own baby, no, this one belonged to the couple next door, at the end of Spinner's End.
The Snapes kept to themselves, Janice having only caught a few glimpses if they passed on the street. She barely even heard them. Through the thins walls separating her home from her neighbours', Janice could write a biography of the family to her left: the ruckus of a teenage daughter, the laughter of a toddling son, the bickering and love making of a couple married for a decade and a half. But to her right, there was nothing. The Snapes barely even existed, at least in Janice's world.
When winter stormed through Cokeworth— her first winter on her own— Janice shuffled through the mounds of snow on her way home and barely spotted the grey figure hunched against the cold outside the last house on Spinner's End. The wife, the Mrs Snape, the nameless woman only a few years older than Janice, sat on the steps outside her house, her eyes closed and face leaning into the wind.
"Hello?" Janice said, less than a foot away at the foot of her own stairs. The wife started, her eyes jumping open and all the peacefulness in her face wrinkled into worry. "Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. I was just wondering if you'd been locked out? You can wait inside my house if you'd like. This cold is practically unbearable."
The wife blinked her dark eyes as if coming back from some fantasy inside her mind. "No," she said with a voice as delicate as the flakes drifting by. "Everything is fine. I only… I only needed a moment. Just a moment away from all the crying." She paused before looking up at Janice and seeing her confused stare. "New mother," she added with a shrug.
Janice nodded in understanding, though she had very little understanding. She'd never had nor wanted children of her own, and the idea of a baby living just next door brought up little emotion besides more confusion since she hadn't known the Snapes were expecting. "Well, you must be doing something right. I haven't heard a single sound through the walls."
"Right," Mrs Snape said as if she'd forgotten something. "Yes… Severus does tend to keep his most disconcerting wails to working hours."
Janice chuckled, drawing out the sound as she felt the conversation fading and her leave approaching. She'd taken one step back when she felt the urge to add, "I doubt I could ever be of much use but if you're ever in need of an extra hand, you know where I live."
Mrs Snape's face almost lifted into a smile. "I appreciate that," she said in a way that Janice knew meant she would never be asked.
"Is there anything I can do now?" The pushy words felt uncomfortable in her mouth, but they tumbled from Janice's mouth before something more polite could come.
"I…" Mrs Snape's mouth hung open a bit as she glanced back towards the door of her home. "I couldn't… but… actually…" She swallowed then continued in a hurry. "If you would just hold hold him for a few moments?"
That was the moment. That was the moment that Janice's little world expanded to include someone other than herself. Mrs Snape scurried back inside, leaving Janice on the porch. When she returned with the baby, she guided Janice's arms to hold him exactly the same way that she had: cuddled close to her chest, hands held securely, and, most importantly, his head resting in the crook of her elbow at an angle that he could just see out into the world. Mrs Snape explained that it was the only position he wanted to be held in, the only one that calmed him down, and her arms were simply exhausted. Janice nodded and pretended not to see the shadows of handprints bruised into the skin that flashed beneath her sleeve.
A real friendship could have started there—perhaps one should have—but Janice never spoke another word to Mrs Snape, never learned to know her by any other name. Janice remembered her, though. She remembered that flash of fear in her eyes when Janice mentioned her husband and how she clutched her son close as they both spotted his father walking towards them down the street.
What could Janice do? That had been her most common excuse, though closely followed by that fact that she had no better evidence to go than a few bruises and her own woman's intuition. Most days, she could convince herself she'd suspected a catastrophe for nothing. Years past that way.
Until that night. The bang and the shout and the snap and the scream and the silence.
Janice jumped beneath her bed covers, clutching her hammering heart. She didn't get up or switch on a light or even glance at the wall that separated her bedroom from a room inside the Snape's house. No, instead, she questioned if it had even happened. Maybe she'd just dreamed it all up? Maybe her imagination had gotten the better of her? That had to be it. After so many years of not hearing a thing from inside the Snape's house, there was no way that commotion had magically seeped through her walls. If noises like that were actually coming from the Snape's household, Janice would have done something. She would have had to. She wouldn't have let another year slip by.
Then she saw him. Him. The baby, practically all grown up now, but Janice recognised him. No, she did more than recognise him. She saw him, really saw him, for the first time.
As the summer sun lit up all the dark corners of Spinner's End, young Severus Snape walked up to the front door of his home as if it were a guillotine. Bruises like the ones Janice had convinced herself she hadn't seen on his mother traced his arms. His dark eyes glanced at her for a moment, but Janice saw the baby she had held all those years ago, that youthful heart trapped into the cage of his own home. It was Spinner's End's trap. Janice hadn't been able to escape, but maybe this boy still could.
"Hello?" Janice said before he could reach the door. He stopped but did not turn around. "Severus Snape, right? That's your name?"
He turned towards her, flicking his hair out of his face, and gave a nearly imperceptible nod.
Janice fiddled with the handkerchief in her hands. "I met you when you were a baby. You won't remember me, but I wanted… I needed to say if… if you ever need anything, no matter what it is, I'm right here, next door. I'm a knock away."
She smiled, expecting and hoping for some positive reaction, some sign that she could make a difference to this boy. Severus's hair fell back over his eyes as he shook his head. "A few years too late," he mumbled before disappearing inside.
Janice's heart sunk to her feet. No, no, no, it was not supposed to happen this way. She didn't think as she marched after him, getting as far as the door, her fist raised to knock, when she stopped again.
What more could she do now? She stared down at her feet, at the steps where she had first seen Mrs Snape, where she'd first held Severus. She stared into the past and cursed herself for letting that woman and child walk away from her that day. That had been it. It had been her moment to impact someone else's world and break free from her own captive life, pacing back and forth from work to home to work to home. That had been it. It had been Severus Snape. But she lost him inside that silent house again.