...aaand we begin with more Petunia backstory, while Snape is busy elsewhere. (Don't worry, all, he'll be returning soon...and when he does, he'll bring some very familiar company with him... :)
Vernon Dursley wasn't handsome, or exotic, or even particularly appealing, but he was always there. And he appreciated what no one else did about Petunia – her extraordinary normalcy. Other suitors would praise her dark eyes or long neck and write poems rhyming "love" with "dove" that made them look and her feel foolish (because she lived with the reality those poems were supposed to represent, and it had green eyes and red hair) – or, worse, look at her dark-eyed and make allusions to the "magic" of love.
Vernon never looked foolish, mostly because he never seemed to try at all. At his most generous, he would sometimes say she looked all right, but he said it as if it was something that you said, rather than because it had anything particularly to do with his feelings or intentions. He would show up, unexpectedly and often at inconvenient times, and invite her to sit on his lap – never mind that she was twenty – or come watch him box, and seemed to take it for granted that she would want to do these things. Conversation never progressed much beyond the shuffling, puce-faced grunting phase. The most you could say for him was that he never seemed disappointed when she turned him down.
And then, on her twentieth birthday, Petunia decided to try getting married.
Petunia decided to get married because she thought, here was something she could do better than Lily. Because, contrary to popular opinion, Petunia Evans was actually quite attractive – when she wasn't standing next to Lily – and because Vernon Dursley (among others, but he was the loudest, if neither handsome nor exotic) thought the stars and the moon and the Earth revolved around her, and because Lily didn't seem to be getting on so well with that horrible Snape boy anymore.
But then Lily brought home James Potter. James Potter, who not only was handsome and exotic and thought the stars and the moon and the Earth revolved around her sister but who also loved Lily more than he loved the other most important thing in his universe: himself.
(In all the rigmarole of dresses and flowers and no-Lily-you-can't-get-married-at-nineteen, war-or-no-war, that horrible Snape boy was utterly forgotten.)
So Petunia ended up getting married not to outdo Lily ("Oh, yes, this is lovely dear but we must save the money for your sister" ...because Lily, of course, had managed a way around her parents as only Lily could) but to escape her, and it was Vernon Dursley, with his cheerful English prejudice and love of normality and his house in Surrey fifty miles away that she finally chose.
She would later remember, long after she had failed to cry at Lily's funeral - would tell herself at night, after she woke herself up shaking in the dark with visions of red hair and stifled sobs, that her marriage was the first decision she had made that didn't have to do with her sister.
She never loved Vernon, but she learned to like him, and even to grow used to him in the end. It was easier to say yes, easier to mold her body and her life around his ideas and inclinations. It was not so much that he was overbearing, but he was not filled with unpleasant memories, and she clung to that – she wanted to be that, wanted to breathe it and wrap the forgetfulness inside her until it clouded out everything she had ever ignored.
She started cleaning and keeping house at first because there was nothing else to do. Vernon was away working, and she didn't know anybody in the new neighborhood, in Surrey, and after her wedding all the old novels (not fantasies, never fantasies) with which she used to entertain herself all fell rather flat. She kept cleaning, and keeping up appearances, because it pleased Vernon, and she was new at the whole being married business and Vernon was so terribly easy to please.
Later she kept up with it – was drawn into it, that awful pull to make all things outwardly, perfectly, terribly normal, so strong it felt as if she were destroying herself when they weren't – out of gradually accumulated prejudice and a grim sense of pride and the realization that this was all that being married would ever be.
There were the good parts of London, there were the bad parts of London, and then there were the hellholes of London. The blocks around Spinner's End were only marginally worse than the very worst of these.
When he first inherited Spinner's End, Snape had initially taken a savage pleasure in magically deconstructing it. He had reordered physical laws to an extravagant degree within the building, sliding arched corridors and sunken cellars in to replace the stairway where he had first seen his mother with a broken nose, the worn window where he had trembled waiting to receive his Hogwarts letter, the hall where his mother's last wand had been snapped, along with his first one…The resulting building was comfortable (if dark), spacious, and unquestionably the wealthiest establishment in the neighborhood – quite possibly, in the entire district. (None of his changes had affected the outside, which resembled nothing so much as a two-story pile of garbage, and still looked too nice to blend in with the surroundings. Foxes were the cleanest of the local vermin.)
It was also (as several former colleagues of both sides would have been shocked to discover) almost completely unprotected. Until Dumbledore, Hogwarts had always been his home.
The inside, Snape noted, bypassing the smashed windows in favor of the apparently untouched front door, now looked almost as bad as the outside. Three months, muggles, and the lure of neglected property had had the inevitable result. At least none of the local wildlife seemed to have moved in yet.
Or had they…
One particularly odorous example of the local vermin was currently lolled, drooling, on his living-room floor, covered with a leather jacket, a healthy layer of fat, and what appeared to be the remnants of Snape's wine cellar. The fact that the damage surrounding said vermin was clearly too extensive to be the work of a single boy did not make Snape feel any more charitable.
"Get out," he snarled, drawing himself up to full glowering-Death-Eater stature.
"I…like…this…place," said the boy slowly. He wasn't even drinking the good wine, Snape saw with disgust, although to be fair all of that had probably gone a long time ago – he was drinking some of the swill from Pettigrew's old stash, and it looked as if it had mold floating in the bottle.
"This. Is. My. House," said Snape slowly, deciding that small words were probably expedient. "You have broken in and stolen my things."
Still no response. Snape sighed.
"What is your name?"
"My friends call me Big D. My friends-"
"Let me guess," Snape sneered. "Your friends convinced you to come here. Your friends were the ones who broke my window, destroyed my house, and drained the better part of a wine collection which is, by the way, a great deal older than you are. You would never normally have contemplated such a thing; you merely stood by and watched as they accomplished all of this. And now they have abandoned you here to take the blame."
"No."
"No?"
"I abanda- abada- I left them."
"You left your friends? What could possibly induce you to abandon the company of such model citizens?"
The boy, perhaps unsurprisingly, missed both the sarcasm and the rhetorical nature of this question.
"They kept hitting people. I like hitting people," the boy said, destroying any shred of sympathy Snape might have had for him, and then continued, shockingly, "But I don't like hitting people smaller than me."
Snape stared at him, dumbstruck. Against all odds, against all experience, all proof, he seemed to have stumbled upon an impossible, an incredible wonder: an adolescent with a conscience.
"What is your name, boy?"
The boy stared glazily up at the ceiling, and, instead of answering, mumbled again, "I like this place. It makes me feel like I've got things I should be doing…"
Yes, Snape thought, that's the Misdirection Charm that's supposed to keep you out. And then he groaned internally; he recognized that glazed look all too well from many of his own early, self-tested, potions experiments. The boy probably had a hell of a hangover.
"All right," he snarled. "Up. If you're going to vomit, it's not going to be on my floor."
"I don't want to move."
"I imagine," said Snape, "you don't want to do a lot of things. One of those things is find out what will happen if you disobey me. Up."
It was rather like watching Longbottom attempting to do magic, and the resulting glassy mess of bottles left Snape wondering whether merely destroying the room himself might be more efficient.
"Into the kitchen," he sneered, disgustedly, and went off to find the hangover potion. There was at least a fifty percent chance that it was still there; in all of the wreckage, it didn't look like anybody had touched anything medicinal.
"Sorry about your house, and all," the boy finally mumbled, fifteen minutes later and several tumblersful of potion more than Snape had anticipated (he had recalculated the boy's weight upwards not once, but twice).
"Go home," Snape sneered.
"I can't." The boy shifted uncomfortably under the resulting glare. "They're fighting again."
"And?"
"I don't-"
"Were you planning to spend the night?" The sarcasm finally hit home. "If you are, may I suggest beginning by paying rent? Or, better, paying for some of the damage you've caused here."
The boy blanched in apparently genuine fear. Just like a student back at Hogwarts, crumpling at the first hint of punishment – the first hint of consequences. Unwilling to face up to the fact that recklessness had consequences, unwilling to stop or think before it was too late...
Snape suddenly felt very old. It occurred to him that he was only thirty-five, and that it could be years, more than sixty intolerable years, before he was finally allowed to die; more than forty years before he truly became old…
"…And I'd be happy to pay you for the gin an' all, really, but there's no more pocket money since we moved and Dad don't want me working, he says it isn't decent-"
"Go home," Snape repeated, wearily. Home, home- he wished he had something more real to offer the boy. But what could you say, to him, to any child – what could you do? There was no way to keep them from the future, from choices, and from all of the horrible, horrible mistakes…
"An' you're not going to tell on me-" the boy tripped, backing towards the door.
"Go home," he said, and wondered, as he turned around in solitude to the broken, lightless room, just where in hell that might be.
Whew! Load of angst there. Thank you so, so much if you've stuck with it this far – next week, I promise things will finally start picking up. And, as an extra treat for being such wonderful readers (I love you all!) here are TWO teasers for the price of one:
"Hello, Lucius."
***
Two days later, coming home from her grocery shopping at nine o'clock PM, the last person Petunia would have expected to see on her doorstep was Severus Snape, covered in blood so thick it had soaked through the front of a full set of tattered black robes.
