He had never seen her before, so he had no clue what brought her there. Nothing but vague suppositions. Perhaps she was a jilted lover, or maybe a parent quashed her life's dream. Maybe a lost job, a debt collector following her – hell, maybe her pet died. It was an enigma to him, but one thing was clear.
She was there, on Waterloo Bridge, staring down into the Thames, and she was holding on to the railings with only one hand.
One hand that was flexing, as if ready to let go.
He ran to her side, dropping the paper bag carrying eggs and milk from the grocer's just before heading to his flat. Nothing else was in his head other than to stop her from making a foolish whimsical mistake.
"Don't!"
His hand grabbed her wrist sharply, painfully, and she screamed, twisting her thin frame around to stare at him, her black eyes rimmed in red, losing her footing in the process, and suddenly his hold on her was the only thing keeping her from plunging into the Thames.
It was the haunted look in her eyes that made him struggle to pull her over the rails, to save her, to not let go. No one deserved such pain.
"How dare you?" Her voice cut at him as she jerked away, her feet finding pavement instead of thin air. "You damned muggle!"
"I'm not trying to mug you! I'm trying to save your damned life!"
"Well, I didn't ask you to save me!"
"You didn't ask to be hurt, either."
He let her go with a harsh drop of her arm, storming off without a backwards glance, storming past his ruined groceries, cursing himself for even bothering with her in the first place.
"Wait….please?"
Her voice. It bound him to her. That's what he remembered, now, as he sat alone in yet another hotel room. Yet another long respite in yet another rented room in yet another nameless town. Her voice, like a chain wrapped around his heart, suffocating his emotions in its grasp.
They spent hours talking at the tavern he brought her to, paying for fish and chips and countless pints of lager and bitter. He told her all about growing up in Dartmouth, coming to London to work with his uncle at the accounting firm, several stories involving him and his little brother, who still insisted on calling him Toby.
That was when she decided she'd call him Toby, too.
But he barely knew her. All she said, guardedly, was that she'd graduated from her boarding school in Scotland, that her father was being unreasonable regarding her choice of occupations, and that she had no nickname she cared recollecting.
So he called her Leena. His Leena. His dark and lonely Eileen.
She wasn't a rare and radiant maiden, but she was brilliant, quick with her wit, and her eyes compelled him with their sadness. Volumes of emotion echoed in a black abyss of sorrow.
It was her father who came between them. Her father who broke the chain. But not without first getting his way.
"You repulsive muggle! You have no business with my daughter, polluting our blood lines!"
"I didn't do anything besides ask Eileen what she wanted for her life! When did you ever allow her to be her own person, to have her own dreams and desires, to become the person she was meant to be?"
"So the person she was meant to be is someone carrying a half-breed bastard in her belly?"
"Damn you, you old man, I love her!"
"Which is why I know you'll do the only decent thing you've ever done and marry her! I won't have my grandson born a worthless bastard."
Their antiquated ways…they drove him mad. But he loved her, if for no other reason than no one else in her life ever had. Their meeting on the bridge wasn't her first attempt to end her life. It just was her most mundane. A cry for help in a family of silence.
The Princes were, evidently, an old family of renown in the wizarding world, and the entirety of their lineage rested with Eileen and her unborn child. Caliban Ricard Prince was in his later years when he sired his only child, the daughter who bore his scorn and repulsion, turning his bitterness inward until she wilted from the lack of affection, a plant that had been kept from sunlight for far too long. This alone gave Tobias every reason to loathe the man. He only saw Eileen as a bargaining chip, a pawn in the game of houses that the wealthy played in their world.
He didn't give a damn for her happiness.
Their wedding was quick and quiet, not at all the social affair it could have been, but then again, Caliban Prince didn't approve of his daughter's choice, and Eileen had become so withdrawn that she had few acquaintances and no friends of her own, so an elopement suited everyone well.
It was Christmas when Eileen began having her contractions, and her doctor merely brushed it off as false labor. She begged Tobias to let her seek a wizarding doctor. The first time in their short marriage she'd so much as mentioned that world.
He obliged, of course.
Caliban Prince met him there, banishing him from the hospital altogether.
"But she's my wife! That's my son! I'm not leaving!"
"Yes, you are. You have no business being here. Your purpose is served."
"My purpose?!"
"My grandchild will be born within all propriety, and as soon as I can arrange the annulment…"
"ANNULMENT?"
"Of course, you foolish muggle. Eileen's had her fun. It's time she grew up and came back home, where she belongs, where she can marry and have children who will not be the disappointment to the wizarding way of life that your offspring will no doubt become."
"You're not taking my wife away from me."
"It's already been done."
It was a week later, as he tried to visit his son and Eileen, that he fully understood what his father-in-law meant. Eileen quietly lay in her bed, pale against the white sheets, her black hair limp, her eyes dead, her voice barely a whisper, asking him to leave.
It was then that he noticed her black eye.
When three men in robes came to escort him back to Muggle London, he left, distraught and confused.
He never got so much as a chance to hold his son.
He knew the way into the alley behind the odd pub that Eileen took him to once, and now and again he slipped inside. It was one of these trips that led him to the news that Eileen had remarried. In the wedding picture in the newspaper, she stood next to a large man who dwarfed her slight frame, and the look of fear consumed her deep black eyes.
No mention of his son. Not a word.
But he knew their traditions, and Eileen couldn't stop him from coming back.
It was August, and he'd been laid off yet again. It didn't matter. This would be the year. He lingered in the darkest corner he could find, watching the children as they eagerly raced by, excited to be purchasing supplies and robes, thrilled to finally be going to their oddly-named boarding school.
He saw him, finally, for the first time.
His son.
The vision of Eileen, from the frail frame to the withdrawn demeanor to the look of utter sadness in his deep eyes.
But when he saw the shadow across his cheekbone, his temper grew. He left his shadowed retreat and began to follow his son, the boy whose name he never even knew.
"Don't. Please, Toby. Don't."
Her voice was still the chain that bound them together.
Tobias turned towards her, his wife, his love, his life, and his eyes immediately filled with tears. "Who did this to you?"
Eileen cut him off with a look. "It doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter? You have a black eye! And he…"
"Severus will be fine, as long as you keep your voice down." Eileen's eyes were wide, and she jerked her head back and forth, searching for something. "Toby, you're a stranger to him. He doesn't know you; Cyrus has been the only father he's ever known. He only got hurt in the first place because he got in the way…"
"In the way of what? Your husband's fist or your face?"
"Toby, please, you don't understand!"
"I understand plenty, Leena. Your father bullied you away from me, took away my wife and my son, and you'd rather stay and be some wizard's punching bag than spend your life with someone who has nothing to do with magic."
"Toby, I…"
"Forget it. I was a fool to think you cared. Goodbye, Eileen."
He lied, though. To her, but more importantly to himself. He loved her, always would.
It wasn't just her voice that bound them together anymore.
It was their son.
The son he'd lost forever.
The odd newspaper he remembered from all those years ago found its way into his briefcase as he checked into the small, rundown hotel. The newspaper where he learned of his wife's remarriage, and her eventual lonely, quiet death in the small, rundown house he visited only once, where he stood in the street for an hour trying to choose whether or not to knock on the door, until he saw two women creep forward and do so, the door opening enough to allow him to see a tall, pale man who carried more grief in his gaunt frame than he should.
Eileen's own shadow.
And now, even he was gone, lost to the rash of odd occurrences that had gone unsolved for years, but which he now knew had been a war.
His only son, gone forever.
He felt the chain as it tightened around his soul, binding them together in their deaths as they never had been in life.
Bound in his grief.