Fourth Interlude: The Disowned Mother
Severus is back in his room, finally; your son is back under your roof.
Yours no longer, if he's to be believed, the bloody foolish wretch of a boy.
Peel the valerian root, focus on the thickness of the slices. Do not let yourself get distracted, can't afford it. And oh, he'll regret that little stunt of his, see if he won't after you're through with him. Dumping all of Tobias' alcohol, as if money grows on trees, when he gets to waltz off to school with a smile on his face, into the clutches of that bloody sorry excuse of a wizard, like every Merlin-blasted idiotic boy who thought there was anything noble and right about dying for other people's power grabs and nebulous, non-existent things such as freedom and equality, and believing such utter rot as that war generals give a shite about lowly soldiers they sacrifice for their own agendas and pretty, popular socialites give two sods about unkempt loners with hearts in their eyes.
Do not think about Aidan. Do not summon spirits long laid to rest, you know no good comes of it.
Except that's easier said than done, isn't it, when Severus is determined to follow in his path. Blasted, thrice-damned idealistic Prince blood; if only Tobias' heritage would have rubbed off on him more, then maybe you'd have managed to keep your boy from making the biggest mistake of his life.
Or maybe you're just kidding yourself; maybe instead of Dumbledore, it'd be Voldemort. Did you really think you could keep him? You? After everything you've gone through, everything you've done?
Mother was right; it's only now that you've got Severus, that you understand the pain of parenthood, the shackles of it. Wouldn't have made a difference back then, of course, and there's no regret for the past, because time has only given you clarity about their depravity as parents, but by Merlin, don't you sometimes wish you'd let Tobias convince you that you'd both be better off not having children.
Foolish, ungrateful boy. If only it would be as easy to straighten him out as wringing his ear and getting him away from that little trollop. If he knew... but that's never going to happen. Burying the past was hard enough the first time, it's not getting dug up again, not even for your only child. He'd turn a deaf ear to it anyway, the way he's always turned a deaf ear to all the rest of the things you tried to teach him.
Yes, Tobias may not have been the best choice in a husband, and most certainly not the best in a father, but Severus does not know the true depths of abusive families, the way that it can rot you from the inside. At least there have never been any lies told to him under this roof; at least he's always known who his parents are, for good and even more for ill. What else would a Slytherin need, to make their life acceptable?
It's that Evans girl who puts these ideas in his head. That she's gotten her claws into him has been obvious for years, yes, but it's always seemed like puppy love, and you know the exact difference between that and true love, couldn't have imagined the former transforming into the latter– No, don't lie to yourself; you thought you'd have enough time to wean him off it before it happened. You know perfectly well how slippery that slope is, how much luck it takes to step off it before it's too late, if there's no outside intervention.
He'd rather go to the depths of hell and back for her than listen to his mother. Foolish, idiotic boy, thinking he's invented melodramatic obsessive teenaged love. Oh, but admit it, Eileen, it worries you so much because you know exactly what he's feeling. That boy is a chip off the old block, and you know he will crash and burn in the worst ways. At least you had sense knocked into you in your youth with enough time to realise your own emotional flaws before you made a mistake of that proportion. At least you went into that kind of love he's feeling with your eyes mostly open. At least you're not deluding yourself about the man you've chosen, or the reasons why there is no other option for you.
Severus is only sixteen years old, and restraint is not in his blood; you should have known better, Eileen. You should have put a stop to it back when there was still time, instead of so foolishly trusting that the social environment of Hogwarts would do your work for you, and relying on your own ability to read him properly to monitor it to its inevitable conclusion.
Merlin take it all, how had you miscalculated so badly? You've known what type the Evans girl is since you first saw her on the playground of their primary, after Severus had come home from playtime bursting at his sullen, quiet seams with stories of another wizarding child. The social butterfly, the little queen bee, the type who thinks she could never be wrong and that the rest of the world is there for her to bestow her blessed graces on and be grateful for it, too. Certainly, that's exactly how she's treated Severus since the moment they became friends. That kind of self-entitlement grates in the worst ways, has since Hogwarts, people who think that those of lower social or economic status were put on this Earth to serve and bow to them, like house-elves. And what grates even more is watching those less fortunate actually accept this as a given, accept it as if they are lucky, even, to be treated as such.
Muggles may not be any different from wizardfolk in this respect, but at least there is comfort in the vastness of the Muggle world, in the anonymity that comes with it. But that's what you get for thinking you could escape into your small self-made world, Eileen – turning around and realising that your own son has become the worst kind of offender, and with the gall to call you a hypocrite over it, too. If only Tobias had not been so angered over the magic, Severus would have been homeschooled and this whole blasted thing could have been avoided.
But that's the one you've earned for yourself fair and square, you don't get to weep bitterly over the consequences, no matter how much you might feel like doing so. No, what you get to do is deal with the fact that your son thinks if he's only good enough, he could somehow earn Lily Evans' love, as if girls like her ever look at boys like him except for a bit of comfort when it suits them and no one else is around. You get to watch yet another boy you love march off into yet another bloody war with rose-tinted glasses, and you get to know that you were not good enough for either of them in comparison to those charismatic, self-centred people that had ensnared them in their nets. If this isn't proof that history only ever repeats itself, then nothing is. And you certainly invited it on yourself from the very first moment you held him in your arms and decided to name him Severus – you know why you chose that name, and it had nothing to do with the descriptiveness of it.
It hurts in a different way this time around, though, doesn't it? You've hardened too much over the years, been made to, under the grind of life's failed expectations and bitter resentment to those who are beyond the reach of it. Could have actually done something this time, couldn't you've, and why hadn't you? Why had you let that connection between Severus and the Evans girl go for so long unchecked?
That there is no good answer to this question is what burns. No good answer except complacency and the failed belief that you know how the world of secondary school works, because you'd lived it. No, that one is an unacceptable mistake that cannot be forgiven. What's worse is that you'd been convinced that the Evans girl had been growing distant for the past several years, because Severus, for all his increasing skill in misdirection and concealment of his thoughts and emotions, had still been projecting it clearly enough for you to read. Lily Evans had been leaving him behind, just as you'd predicted she would, as Severus had made it clear in his sparse letters over the school year, in his quietly intense fury at home and his bitter desperation at winning her time over the summer, even his silly spats with the elder Evans girl, Petunia.
So what had changed in the span of one school semester, between one holiday period and the next? What had happened to that boy, that he had sold his soul to a weak, uncaring, manipulative piece of excrement like Albus Dumbledore and thought it better than all the life experience you had endeavoured to impart on him? True, he's become harder to read, but he's never been able to hide his desperation to be something contrary to his own nature for the Evans girl, and that had, if anything, grown even stronger this summer. And there is nothing at all you've seen in the last two and a half months to indicate that the Evans girl has in any way changed towards him. In fact, it seemed rather the opposite, with that other boy suddenly in their midst, a buffer between them if ever you've seen one.
Yet clearly, he has stepped onto a path you had not anticipated for him, one you had not even truly imagined was in his sights. A path he thinks you are too late to pull him off of, and knowing he gets his stubbornness from you and Tobias in equal measure, it's hard do doubt the veracity in his words. But oh, your heart's grown cold with fear since last night, and it'll not be warming back up, because you know how that road ends, you've seen it. Your boy will be dead before he even properly steps foot in his third decade of life, and he will die without even knowing to regret it, because cold as he will be in the ground, he will not get to see that it will have been for nothing, that Lily Evans will not have cared except in perhaps a remote sort of way one regrets the passing of those one found to be useful toys to keep around for one's own pleasure.
Life may be suffering, but if it is to be given up, then it should be given up for this reason alone, and not as a present for anyone else's reasons. It is one's own, and it should be lived for oneself only. Wish you'd taught him that in time, but perhaps that too was a lesson you'd been reluctant to pass on to him, bitterly as you've learned it. Sentiment has clouded your judgment, Eileen. Motherhood was not made for you, your parents were right in that, and Tobias too.
What's left, then? What is left to be said or done, so that your son is not out of this house at the stroke of midnight on January 9th? Was this how your parents felt when you packed your bags and put them behind yourself forever? Do they think of you and regret the things they'd done or not done? Not bloody likely, they're not those kinds of people, they're not capable of doubt or regret.
Do what you've always done – try to make Severus see the world for what it truly is, try to guide him into thinking the way a Slytherin should. It's the only thinking that might spare his life, and he's going to need it, if he is as determined on this path of his as he seems. Making him realise the kind of person that the Evans girl is clearly isn't working, but getting him to understand it will protect him, too, make him less willing to blindly sacrifice his life in an attempt to win her over with foolish heart-bleeding heroics.
As for him and Tobias... if he's proven anything yesterday, then the boy's proven he knows perfectly well how to use Tobias for his own ends. No one gets to pick their parents, more's the pity, and Tobias hasn't been the same since the mess that pushed him to the serious drink, true enough, but he's still your husband and his father. You won't tell him what kind of relationship to have with Tobias, not with the hand you'd been dealt on that front yourself, and you'd done plenty of interference in that boy's youth to keep the peace at home, even made him stay at school that year when Tobias had hit bottom and you with him. That ought to have been enough; if he's old enough to decide to go to war, then he's old enough to decide whether he wants to get into needless confrontations with his alcoholic father.
Tobias is a disappointment to Severus, it's the state of things. You played your part in it, and that can't be taken back; so has the drink and so have Tobias' demons; so have even your boy's temper and misplaced sense of chivalry that erratically surfaces here and there. None of it can be changed, therefore there is no point wishing it were not so. But at least your boy has the good luck to know where he stands with Tobias, to know what to expect at any given moment and to know how much he will or won't receive for what he demands. It's far more than you'd ever had, and it's certainly more than enough to make something out of. If he wishes it to be blood and insults because the Evans girl has hurt his feelings for the hundredth time, that's his choice, but he will not get your coddling for it.
One day, he'll look back and realise that what you've given him might not have been much or what he wanted, but it's most certainly what he's needed and will if he wants to survive, especially with this choice he's made – good instincts, quick mind, and the understanding that the world is not a nice place. How that Evans girl fits into it, he'll have to realise it for himself; he's made himself perfectly clear on how he sees your interference on that point.
And since you've long ago realised that hope is a useless emotion that only serves to cloud the mind, all that you've got left is to be watchful in case he needs you, make sure there's always a place for him under this roof, as unwelcome as he sees it, and carry this coldness in your heart until either the war or your son are ended, whichever comes first.
It's what you signed up for, Eileen, when you chose to have him in spite of Tobias' insistence on it being a bad idea, when you were foolish enough to think that you have better luck with second chances than with first. There's that motherhood you'd wanted seventeen years ago, those chains around your heart. If you were fool enough not to realise what they meant until you'd had him, you've no one to blame but yourself – not Tobias, nor your parents or those three boys who'd burned your girlish heart to cinders. Not the Evans girl, much as you want to. Not even your stubborn, infuriating, naïve little boy, whom you'd given what little of your heart had been left to you after your youth and Tobias got their share.
If there's one thing life has taught you, it's to endure those things you can't change, no matter the cost. Since the moment you held him as a squalling infant in your arms, you knew – there was never any other choice when it came to your boy.
A/N: I want to thank firstly my quasi-beta, Moon999, for her infinite patience for my last-minute chapter deliveries, as well as her constant help and support regarding character psychology and my writing in general. You rock, girl! Then, of course, a huge 'THANK YOU' to all my faithful readers and those who joined in only recently but sat through what's already a 300k story and won't be ending any time soon, who have left their reviews and favorites and follows. I hope I haven't disappointed so far, and that I won't in the future.