Trigger warnings: Physical and sexual violence.

The Pureblood Prince

Chapter 32 – Ignorance is Unity

Eileen heaved a solemn sigh as she slipped off her blister-causing heels and laddered stockings and fell back upon her marital bed, cup of tea in hand, after a particularly rotten and busy shift. The springs screamed their customary prong of protest as she did so, and immersed herself in the silence, the complete uninterrupted silence, that surrounded her. It was too forlorn. She needed to hear something other than her own thoughts.

She took a last swig of the wretched vaguely-tea-flavoured mug of dirt and turned over onto her stomach, where she began sorting through the piles of this week's overdue bills… she was infinitely glad that she had not read the bottom of the electricity bill (glaring up at her in all its malicious, red-inked glory) with a draught of stagnant tea in her mouth – it would have bled straight into her bronchioles and suffocated her. How many pounds? How was that even possible? She was lying here in the dark with nothing but the streetlights to aid her vision… they all sat in the dark ninety percent of the time. They had no central heating. Was brewing the tea she had just consumed behind it? Eileen shut her throbbing eyes to the figure and let the palms of her hands rest upon them; she did not want to see any of the others… this one alone was her entire weeks pay.

The rest of the bills flew into the air and tumbled upon the carpet as Eileen flicked up the blankets and ducked underneath it; the covers molded against her overwrought body like a cotton cast. It was one of those idiosyncrasies she would forever carry over from childhood into adulthood – feeling completely untouchable underneath this fortress of suffocating, muggy darkness. No repossession man or bellowing father running up the stairs to strike her for non-compliance or otherwise could drag her out of this steel fortress. She could wither away and die here if she pleased – no one had the authority to take that choice away from her. Eileen scrunched her already shut eyes… those thoughts again… they were much harder to get rid of now her child was no longer a child, but a young man who didn't need her to be strong, a mother, anymore. There suddenly seemed to be a lot less to fight for.

Please be good tonight, Toby.

She could do with a warm bath, but she feared a single clockwise turn of the rusted facet would cost them the house. Eileen thought the safest thing to do was to fall asleep instead.

The shadowed man had already reached the third step outside the front door when she awoke from the all-too-familiar nightmare of… him. Not of the man named Black, but of Tom Riddle – He Who Must Not Be Named as the rest of the world knew him. She knew it was Tom from his eyes; though the rest of him was completely unrecognisable… a grotesque cross between a serpent and a raven, a long slithering ribbon with feathers, a beak and fangs that dripped scarlet with blood. She was trapped in a box made entirely of steel bars as the ravensnake slowly made its way toward her, all she could do was wait and see what it would do as it slithered through the bars and twisted itself around her bare legs, the feathers tickled her naked torso as it climbed methodically toward and around her neck – cutting off all protest, rendering her immobile and locked.

"You've served your purpose, girl." - was the last utterance she caught before the fangs pierced her artery and her brain jerked her back into welcomed reality. She gasped and threw the blanket halfway off the bed, grasping frantically at the nape of her neck.

The knock at the door was the final straw in setting each and every one of her nerves on fire. She jumped so harshly that she felt her diaphragm thump against the barrel of her lungs. If Toby had forgotten how to put the key in the lock again then he could bloody well stay out there and freeze!

But when she opened the door, just enough to see the face of the caller, the face looking back at her was more unwelcome even than her spouse.

"Piss off," she spat viciously.

"Always such a pleasure, Mistress Snape." Parker replied with a toothy, golden grin.

"That was your one and only warning," she cautioned. "Leave this house."

"Oh don' worry, pet. This won' be like last time. I'm not stayin' fer tea."

"Damn right you're not."

The feeble door creaked and cracked in protest as two pairs of hands pressed with equal potency upon both sides of the timber. Eileen bared her teeth, desperately craving to hear a click, something to indicate that she had least a few seconds to run into the kitchen.

She finally received her opportune moment when Parker started talking to her – draining some of his concentration away from his hands.

"Listen! I only wanna talk to yeh about yer good-fer-nothin' husband! That's all I wanna-!"

The door gave its sweet welcomed click, and she ran. He, of course, followed… however when he did reach her he was met with the dulled blade of a knife.

"GET OUT, or I will make you!" Eileen shrieked. Parker immediately threw up his hands and begun to back away, led by her shaking hand. What she wouldn't give for her wand. She would cut off her left arm with this very knife for it. There had to be something she could do wandlessly; she never thought that she had been powerful enough for magic like that in the past until she did it to Tobias… she surely could do it again.

She started making sudden movements, like a lioness who just begun to pounce upon her pray but changed her mind at the very last minute. Parker did not soar back through the air as Toby had done, but she would be lying if she had said her attempts of warding him off had been unsuccessful. At the very least her abrupt erratic behavior startled him so much that, very briefly, he momentarily lost all concentration. In that one split second, Eileen seized her moment. She fought not as a witch but as a Muggle woman. The blade sliced its away across sweaty, unshaven flesh.

"Argh! Yeh fuckin' bitch!"

Parker howled in pain and stumbled back a few paces, clutching his oozing cheek.

"I said get out!"

"Got a bit more fight in yeh since last time, eh!"

The sight of a fully grown man grappling his way toward her stirred something within her… he could very well have been storming toward to wrench the knife out of her hand (although Parker did not do himself any favours in his defense by breaking down Eileen's door and swearing at the top of his lungs… not the world's smartest man), but she wasn't going to lay down and take that risk.

"Well you see I couldn't move as well when I was thirty weeks pregnant, and my bedroom was engulfed with flames!"Eileen screamed as she swung the knife back and forth like a madwoman. She had barely gotten the words out of her mouth when he lunged at her, tackling her to the ground. He was contending for the weapon in her hand. She thought otherwise. So did her husband when he stumbled up to the front door – saw it ripped from its hinges - and had dashed into the kitchen in a wild panic, bellowing for her.

"EILEEN!"

He must have been sober with the kind of precision in which his boot came into contact with the very same cheek that she had bloodied. Parker's head whipped backward so aggressively that Eileen was sure she heard his spinal cord pop… oh well. Her nourishing conjecture was cut short as Parker rose up, as if from the dead, and swung at Tobias. From behind the blade Eileen saw a cascade of droplets – clear and scarlet – spray into the air behind his head; as he turned and threw Parker into the bookshelf, she made her move. As Tobias kept the equivalently red man pinned against Tamburlaine the Great and Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, Eileen skirted around her spouse and drove the tip of what she was now visualising to be a switchblade or stiletto into the nape of his carotid. She willed him, willed him, to make an impulsive jolt just so she could argue that he was the one who moved and killed himself. Unfortunately he was frozen in paralyzed fear – widened pupils darting from man to woman, and back again, and back again.

"Your deafness could be your demise," Eileen warned with far narrower, blacker, eyes. "Get. Out."

"Yeh heard her," Toby reiterated, his elbow taking care of Parker's airway as his wife dominated the vessels.

"She…" Parker croaked, "… Eileen hasn' even heard wha' I… gotta say."

"She don't wan't to!" Tobias blasted. "I think she made that perfectly clear, don't yeh?"

"Fine… I'll say it, again. I want my brass, Snape. Nex' time… I… I won' be so gentle with her."

This time Parker was thrown into the ground. So hard that Eileen expected him to tumble into hell. Tobias started laying blows that she had never seen before… Parker had always been infinitely stronger than Toby, but at this moment he could very well have been a paper cup being pummeled by a stamping press. Usually, Eileen would have been screaming at him to stop – wrenching him off and snapping back into a reality where words were infinitely more hurtful than violence – but she did not think that words worked on such primitive beings as Parker. She wanted Tobias to punch him into oblivion for coming into her house, her sanctuary, and laying his revolting hands upon her. Now it's time for hands to be lain upon you, beast.

"Fucking, worthless -! Least it's a step up from trying to burn a pregnant woman to death!"

"I'll drive this into your spine!" Eileen interjected – and with full intention. She crawled onto the floor next to Toby where they both towered above him. "All you wanted was money? You would have beat me… raped me… just for a few fucking quid? Get up."

Toby grabbed him by the neck that she was threatening; he began pulling him out toward the door with Eileen in tow.

"I ain't the thief here, Misses," Parker continued through the shoves and swearing and threats of murder. "Yeh migh' wanna check the facts with yer trus'worthy soul-mate there before yeh start accusing me of robbin'."

What?

"Yer lucky I'm not calling the bobbies after yeh!" Toby roared as he threw Parker against the broken doorframe.

"S'if yeh, Toby Snape, would ever willingly attract the attention of any bobby. They'd lock yeh right up before they took a look at me. Wonder what lass's purse yeh shoved yer hand in to whip out that thirty quid fer me-"

"What are you talking about?" Eileen barked before she realised by asking she would be keeping him here longer. "Don't answer that," she added. "Just go – and we will call the Mugg – the police – if you EVER come back here, do you hear me?"

"Though by the smell of it I'd say yeh'd nicked the hundred yeh owe and drank the rest away. Got yeh priorities right ain't yeh, Snape?"

"Are you deaf! Get the hell out of my house, you slimy little cretin!" Eileen threw the knife behind her left hip preparatory to taking another swipe and thanked the stars that Toby had enough insight to leap cleanly out of her way as she swung Parker clear from the entrance. He tumbled onto the pavement before them and tripped over the gutter; a mildly intrigued tabby cat glared at him from its perch on the bricked fence.

"Don' worry, Snape! I'll come back ter jog yer and yer family's memories until yer North England's most wanted man!"

Eileen held up her hand and gave a small wave with her ring and pinky fingers and calmly attempted to shut the inoperative door behind her. That would definitely need to be fixed tonight. She turned to find her husband absent from the hallway; she sunk to her knees and leant against the support of the wall for a while. She didn't know what to think, or to say, she could not be bothered trying to figure it all out.

She rubbed her sore throat and crawled back into the living room, where she found Toby lying in the middle of the floor – gazing up at the ceiling, shaking his head as if he was arguing with himself.

"Tobias."

That was all she wanted to say. He stopped thinking and turned his head to look at her, blood and sweat began to pour down his lips and into the nape of his neck as he shifted.

"I'm…" something perched on the edge of his lips, she could tell, but he kept it locked in. "Come here…" he whispered in exasperation.

Eileen didn't know if she would hold him or hit him when she finished slinking toward him. She didn't end up doing either. She flopped down next to him on the floor and stared into his eyes.

"Come here," he repeated and drew her into his arms. She didn't resist, but that wasn't all to do with her love for him, she was also far too tired to move anymore. Eileen closed her eyes and used his chest as a rather uncomfortable pillow as he stroked her back and kissed her hair. The sheer enragement at an all-too-familiar foe and the euphoria at overcoming him, together, as a proper partnership, asphyxiated any reasoning and logical thought and need for discussion. They began stripping off each other's clothes until they were nothing but skin and blood, their bodies shifted together with the same unison they had shown earlier. Watching Tobias in blissful agony above her, his skin tinted pink and blood dripping methodically from his lip onto her delicate breasts, filled her with such disconcerting erotic ecstasy that it didn't take him long to hurtle her over the edge.

If only she had the power of Legilimency - to see that her husband was rapturous over an entirely different reason all together… that it was his blood and not hers he was covered in. That he was sure that he would have found her dead. That it would have been his fault.

No. She wouldn't have been quite as accommodating.