They Didn't Know We Were Seeds
The next morning Severus seriously contemplates skiving off potions to avoid Lily a little longer. He has a list of spells to research and whatever Horace decides to teach today the chances are Severus knows it better than the man himself. However, he's hardly out of his dorms before he's accosted by the Gryffindor. Lily doesn't look like she's well-rested and there's a definite note of displeasure to her tone when she asks, "Can we talk?"
He's very tempted to deny Lily her request. Severus doesn't want to talk to her right now, he just wants to stew. However, Severus knows refusing her request will not go over well and be detrimental in the long-run. More detrimental than the conversation to come already will be, anyway. Severus nods at Lily before he turns to Sage and tells him, "I'll catch up with you in a while, alright?"
His brother looks between the two of them, gaze assessing and lips pursed. Severus knows Sage has a thousand and one questions he wants to ask and he tries to convey he will answer them all later if he would just hurry along and leave him and Lily to it. After a moment, Sage seems to understand this. Even so, he asks, "Should I save you a seat?"
Severus sighs. He has every intention of making this as quick and painless as possible – for both of their sakes – but he knows better than to expect things will go as planned. "Probably not."
"Okay," Sage replies and with one last knowing glance, his brother hurries off to join their fellow Slytherin yearmates on their way to breakfast. A couple of them cast looks over their shoulders when Sage fits himself into their groups. Their eyes flash with interest and lips part in preparation to rabbit amongst themselves. Severus hopes Sage will find a way to shut it down before it can get out of hand. He'd prefer not to be the talk of Slytherin this week if he can help it.
With Sage now gone, Lily begins to tug on his sleeve. "Come one," she urges. "The potions classroom should be empty right now."
As he follows the Gryffindor to the potions classroom, Severus hopes that for once in his life that Horace has decided to prepare for his class early instead of leaving it until the beginning of said class. A couple of minutes later when they pass the threshold of the classroom, he does his best to squash his disappointment. Of course Severus can't be lucky enough to have one thing go the way he wants. As Lily picks her usual desk near the front, Severus casts a privacy charm over them to keep away nosey students before he joins her in taking a seat.
For a time, Lily stares at him, arms crossed, with an air of expectation around her. Severus, who's a little annoyed at her presumptuousness, ignores the obvious cues and returns her gaze with a steady one of his own, right eyebrow quirked just so as he stares back at her. He's far more patient than she and Severus will win this staring contest if nothing else today.
Lily, as he expects, breaks first. Arms falling to her side in vexation, she asks, "Why did you take off like that last night?"
Severus does nothing to stop how his lips curl into a sneer because he almost can't believe Lily. He was a spy and she's a wears-her-heart-on-her-sleeve Gryffindor. Surely she knows why he ran off so quickly? She wasn't subtle in the least last night! Leaning in, he hisses, "I don't know, why don't you tell me?"
She growls with frustration and gets to her feet. Running her hands through her hair, she paces a few steps away before turning around to face Severus once more. "Why do you always have to be such a prick?" Lily snaps. "Why can't you ever just answer a question like a normal person?"
Not one to take such insults lying down, Severus stands up and shouts, "I'm not one of your obtuse Gryffindor friends, Lily! I noticed! "
Lily's face flickers with bafflement and then unease. But she doesn't reply immediately. Instead, they fall into another silent staring contest, though, this time, their eyes are far harder and twice as vicious. Like before, Lily is the first to speak – even if it's with great and furious reluctance. "What are you talking about?" the Gryffindor question, voice quiet.
Severus shakes his head in disbelief. "Merlin, you're the obtuse one, aren't you?"
Lily says nothing, the only indication she's listening at all being the offended narrowing of her eyes into little more than slits. Severus briefly is reminded of Nagini and how her eyes were similarly thinned before she struck. Unbidden, his hand goes to his neck. He takes a moment to remind himself there's no danger of dying here. Lily would never. No matter what he says to her.
"You fancy Cresswell," he spits.
Eyes now blown wide with shock, confusion, and… fear? (Severus isn't quite certain he's identifying it right with the other emotions swirling in her green gaze) "No, I don't," she denies.
He scoffs. "Then why were you looking at him like someone dosed your pumpkin juice with Amortentia last night?"
"No… I wasn't—"
"—I know you said you didn't want anything serious, but I thought we were keeping this exclusive—"
"—We are!"
Severus levels Lily with a look of patent disbelief.
Her shoulders collapse, her chin drops, and her hair cascades forward to hide her face from him. "I didn't mean to," she whispers.
He knew she liked him, but to hear her say it aloud… It's different. Severus sits back down and says nothing – Even if he wanted to, he wouldn't be able to. His throat feels stuck and swollen like he's in the midst of an allergic reaction and Severus doesn't think he'd be able to do so much as cough if he wanted. So he waits. Lily will talk soon enough, he's sure of that. Guilt can loosen a tongue as much as it can stay it.
"I didn't intend to fall for Dirk. At first, I just wanted to help him. What he's going through right now… It's not too different from what I went through with James. We both started this all thinking somewhere down the line we'd be able to pick things back up with our spouses and continue the lives we had with them before. Oh, Severus, I know you try, but you don't understand how much it hurts to realize that we can never have what we had again."
Lily pulls her hair back away from her face and meets his gaze for a moment. "It's like… It's like they died again, but you can never escape them because they became a ghost – one who haunts you. And worst of all, they aren't maliciously following you around or trying to put on the airs of being living, they just don't know. And you can't say anything because they wouldn't understand or you'd scare them or hurt them and you love them too much…"
Shaking with suppressed sobs, Lily whispers, "I don't even have to speak with him, sometimes. Dirk just gets it. Gets me. It reminds me of what I had with James, the love we shared… And I've been afraid I'd never experience that feeling with anyone again, but it's happening right now, with him and I… I'm falling for him."
Severus watches tears slide down Lily's cheeks in silence. Half of him wishes to join her and the other wants to worsen them. But what would either action accomplish? At this point, nothing. Shifting his gaze away for a moment, he counts the stones in the wall until he feels calmer. Then, quietly, he asks, "Why did you agree to date me if you're falling in love with him?"
"You're my best friend and I already love you. I thought… I don't know, it sounds silly to me now, but I thought if I dated you I could learn to really love you like you deserve before what I feel for Dirk could consume me." She wipes the tears from her face with the heel of her hand. "But I was wrong." Taking a large, shaky breath, she admitted, "And now, I've bungled things with you and I'm probably going to ruin things with Dirk too because he's still grieving Mei and I don't think I can keep quiet about how I feel for much longer."
He wants to tell her yes, she's cocked up everything and that she is going to be alone for the rest of her days at the rate she's going, but, instead, he sighs in resignation. Defeat weighs on his shoulders like a pillory. Once again, something he's wanted more than anything in all of the world is slipping through his fingers and he can't see a way to hold on. Severus is starting to feel that he will never do enough penance for all of his wrongs to have fate finally shine her favor on him.
"You haven't messed everything up," Severus tells her through his clenched teeth. "If you haven't noticed, Cresswell is just as enamored with you as you are him. He's just not done anything because we've been seeing each other. "
First, a look of shock overcomes Lily, which is then quickly followed by relief and hope, and finally, guilt.
Severus seizes on the opportunity to lay out what's going to happen between the two of them now. He can't do this anymore. He's tired and wants away. Maybe, now that he's gotten a taste of just how impossible he and Lily are he can finally kill the kernel of hope that's always resided in him that in another life, another world, he and Lily could actually work. "We're done, by the way. Do what you will with Cresswell now, but I don't want to hear about it, and, preferably, not see it either. If it were feasible, I'd say I want you to stay away too, but I know it's not. We have too much that has to be done for us to ever not be in each other's lives at this point. So, instead, I ask you to leave me alone unless it's about the better world we're crafting." He hardens his gaze as he concludes, "Do you understand?"
She nods, fresh tears coming to her eyes. "Yes."
"Good."
With a wave of his wand, he cancels the privacy spells on the classroom and leaves. Once out, he checks the time. It seems, to his fortune, there is still a little time left for breakfast in the Great Hall. Maybe he can find Sage and convince him to cut class with him so he can have someone to keep him company as he wallows. Perhaps Sage will even want to join him. He's got a bit of a crush on Cresswell, doesn't he? Surely hearing him and Lily are on their way to being a couple will disappoint him as well – even if the two of them never had a chance at anything.
-o-O-o-
While eating his toast, Sage pays little mind to his housemates' chatter. He has more pressing concerns, like what it is Lily and Severus might be discussing. Lily didn't look particularly happy when she asked to speak with Severus and his brother seemed quite resigned when he agreed to her request. He wonders if it's just another tiff or if this will be it for them. A selfish part of him hopes this will be the end of Severus and Lily. It will make the coming year much easier if Severus isn't dating and spending all of his time with a Muggleborn. All the attention he gives to Scabior is bad enough.
"—It's stupid! How is knowing Muggles like to get their information from a telly-vision going to help me in the future?" Pucey complains.
Sage turns his head.
Wilkes makes a noise of sympathetic agreement. "It makes them sound lazy if you ask me," he replies.
He frowns at the other teenager, a smart remark about who's really the lazy one forming on the tip of his tongue.
"Yes, you're right!" Crabbe exclaims. "Is it really that much more difficult to go about it the normal way and read?"
Sage opens his mouth to asks Crabbe if that's true, then why does he never see her reading? When Pucey sighs loudly.
Head in her hands as she glares hatefully at her half-eaten eggs, she grumbles, "Muggle studies is useless."
"I think it's interesting," Sage says a moment later, thinking of the Muggle station their professor plays for them on her Wireless at the end of every class for five to ten minutes. He doesn't know how she managed to get the Wireless to play Muggle stations, but Sage loves listening to it. It sounds so foreign sometimes, like when it talks about traffic (Merlin, is he glad for apparation), but strikingly familiar at other times, such as when the announcer drones on about the weather. Sometimes, he daydreams about working for the Muggle Wireless and helping the announcers organize their music and plan out what jokes they'll say about the news headline of the day. Sage knows there's not even a snowball's chance in Hell he'll ever get to work for the Muggles, but, maybe, he could do the same for the Magical Wireless someday.
The three look at him, and then at each other. They erupt into loud, eye-drawing laughter. "Of course you do, Muggle-lover," Wilkes jeers.
Sage flushes from embarrassment and anger. He's not a Muggle-lover! Sage only likes their wireless. Everything else he hates, just like his brother, his mother, and Great Uncle Demitiri. It was the Muggles and their tricks that stole away Aunt Eileen and lead her to marry a man who hurt her and Severus for years before they got them back. Sage is proud of what Boyd did to get back at the Muggles for how they mistreated Aunt Eileen and Severus. His only wish is that they'd done it sooner. Perhaps then Aunt Eileen wouldn't have been so brain-washed into loving the Muggles that she wanted revenge on Adam Parkinson for laying the killing curse on Severus's father.
"No! That's not it at all," he snaps. "It's interesting because it shows you what's important to them and what their weaknesses are! Haven't you paid any attention to how much they talk about their automobiles and motorbikes and tube stations on the Wireless? Most of them use it to get anywhere in their towns. If someone really wanted to teach the pests a lesson, attacking their transportation during their peak hours of commute would be the best way to do it!" he argues.
Wilkes and Crabbe snort in disbelief, but Pucey looks a little bit thoughtful and a couple of Seventh years to her right are staring at him with appraising eyes. "That's quite the observation, Montague," Walden Macnair remarks, green eyes keen. "What do you think, Lex?"
Sage shifts his gaze to Alexander Pyrites. The dark-skinned upper-year flashes his friend a conspiratorial grin. "He's downright brilliant, figuring out something like that." He looks over at Sage then. "It's good to know there's some truth in all that waxing of poetic his brother does about him too."
His mouth goes dry. Sage tries to think of a time when Pyrites and his brother may have talked or where they may know each other from. He knows they can't be old schoolmates, Sage never saw them together when Boyd was at Hogwarts and his brother never talked about him either. Could it be that Boyd works with a relative of Pyrites? Sage doesn't think so. Lex Pyrite is the only Pyrite he knows under thirty and he's certain both of Pyrites's parents work for the Ministry Press and nowhere near his brother's department in the Ministry.
It leaves only one possibility for where the two could have crossed paths.
His stomach's contents begin to flip and Sage wonders if Macnair met his brother that way too or if his older sister or cousins introduced them at some other point. It probably doesn't even matter, MacNair's father's a Death Eater, as is his sister's fiancé, and two of his three cousins; by next summer he'll probably be sporting the same mark as the rest of his family.
Even though all he wants to do is be sick, Sage nods at the upper-years and offers a brief, tight-lipped smile before returning his attention to his breakfast. As he pokes at his uneaten ham, Sage hopes the two don't say anything to their contacts in the Lord's group. He doesn't like the thought that he could end up being the one who planted the seed to attack a bunch of innocent, unaware people in such catastrophic way. Sage had been trying to show his yearmates he wasn't a Muggle-lover, that was all. He doesn't really want anyone to take his hypothetical plan under real consideration.
Before his fear can really consume him, however, Severus appears.
"Can you make room?" the other asks.
Sage scoots over immediately. He's relieved Severus found time to make it to breakfast; his timing is perfect too. Instead of worrying about what Macnair and Pyrites will or will not do with his idea, he can distract himself by asking Severus about what he and Lily talked about. His brother sits down, but makes no move to start filling a plate with breakfast food or to pour himself a glass of pumpkin juice. Instead, he stares almost unseeingly at the grooves in the tabletop.
Nervously, Sage lays a hand on Severus's shoulder a moment. "Are you… All right?"
His brother lifts his gaze. "Hm? Oh, I suppose." He reaches for the pitcher of water and gets himself a cup. As he pours it, he says, "Lily and I are done, by the way."
"What?" he says, surprised at how plain Severus is being.
He just nods. "She fancies someone else more and I decided it wasn't right we continue dating."
"Severus, I'm sorry—"
"—Who she fancies is Cresswell, by the way." Severus takes a sip of his water and meets his gaze. "I'm quite sure he likes her just as much as she likes him," he adds.
Sage ignores the small pang his own heart gives. He knew from the moment he admitted to fancying the boy the chances of Cresswell ever being interested in him in return were slim. What he's feeling right now is nothing on what Severus must be going through. He and Lily were an actual couple and did all the things together that it entails. He claps a hand on his brother's shoulder and draws him close. "I'm sorry."
Severus sighs and leans in briefly, seemingly trying to gather strength from Sage's touch. When he pulls back, he asks, "Feel like skiving off potions and commiserating with me?"
He knows he shouldn't, he's a prefect and really ought to be setting a good example for their fellow students. But… Severus needs him to be there for him more than his classmates need to see Sage being a model student in potions. So, he nods and says, "Yeah, let's go."
Lily and Severus are no more! Romantically, anyway. How did you all like the second scene? Did you like that it was from Sage's perspective? Anything you didn't like about this chapter?
Thanks for reading, as always, I appreciate you taking the time to do so :)
Edited: 12/28/19