2.
Rain was in the air; dreary gray breezes blew through the playground, setting the roundabout listlessly spinning. Empty swings nudged forward, fell back. Every now and then, wind would catch in the eaves of nearby buildings, under the curve of the slide, howling like little ghost children. Two pale, gaunt, bedraggled siblings sat in the swings, looking not unlike ghost children themselves.
"We should go back home," Severus said glumly, "It's going to be pouring soon."
"I don't care," Cordelia said, kicking a spray of dirt up with the toe of her trainers. If Severus' trainers were worn and dirty, Cordelia's were doubly so, because they had once been his. "I'd rather sit here in the rain than go home and listen to them row."
"Mum will be cross if we come into the house with wet clothes and mud, you know she will." Still, there wasn't much conviction in Severus' odd little face.
"Do you think they ever got along?" Cordelia wondered, chewing on her bottom lip absently.
"Dunno," Severus said, gliding back and forth without much enthusiasm, eyes shifting between his sister, the heavy clouds overhead. A breeze lifted his stringy black hair, pushed it straight into his eyes. He clawed it away, felt a raindrop land fat and cold at his crown, slide down his forehead. "It's hard to imagine."
"I wouldn't marry someone if I couldn't get along with them," his sister said earnestly, "If they were mean, I'd just tell them to go away and I'd be by myself."
"Yeah," Severus agreed, "Me too." He tried to imagine it, briefly; finding someone he would want to be with forever, deciding to get married. It seemed such a long way off, both in time and probability, that it might be never. He thought maybe could glimpse it, just for a second: holding someone's hand, smiling at her. In his mind, she had red hair. Severus blushed, glanced at his sister to see if she had noticed.
Cordelia's pale eyes were focused somewhere faraway - not absent, exactly, just somewhere else. A cold breeze whipped hanks of tangled black hair in her face, but she hardly seemed aware of it.
"We should go home," Severus said again, shifting his weight off of the swing reluctantly. "Maybe they won't be arguing anymore. Come on, Cor - hey, you're bleeding."
She was. Small, bright beads of shiny blood dotted her lower lip, where she had bitten down; she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth carelessly, stood up from the swings.
"Why don't you want me to meet your friends?" she tilted her face towards him, feet planted in the dirt that was rapidly becoming mud as more and more fat raindrops fell.
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw you with a girl, in the yard. I wanted to play, too."
"That's only one friend," Severus said, because it was all he could think to say.
The sky opened up. Bullets of rain came down, and Cordelia shrieked; both children started running for home, mud splashing up and sticking to their trainers, the legs of their trousers.
Soaked to the bone, they rounded the house, skirting the front door and running across the cobbled yard to the kitchen door. Severus pulled the door open, and they piled inside, where the staccato rhythm of the rain faded in intensity.
They stood in the kitchen, dripping onto the linoleum floor. The interior of the house was dark, and felt silent and still.
"I'll go get a towel," Cordelia said, her voice loud and somehow flat in the heavy quiet. She tore through the kitchen, shoes squelching - she was already in the living room when Severus called after her.
"Shoes, Cory!"
Cordelia didn't respond to him; instead she remain rooted to the floor, a few steps inside the living room, staring at something in the corner where a bookshelf surprisingly devoid of books and an armchair lived.
"H-hi, Dad," she said, her voice small. Barely contained fright pushed at the edges of her voice, causing it to waver. Severus felt his heart speed up, unbidden, and he slipped out of his shoes, thunking them down on the ratty little mat inside the kitchen door. He prowled to the living room, slipped up behind his sister, a protective if equally helpless shadow.
Tobias was in the armchair, a glass of whiskey in the hand that dangled over the edge of the chair. Dirty, thinning brown hair fanned across his forehead, hung too long behind his ears. Beads of sweat glistened on his clammy skin.
"You heard your brother," he drawled, and there was a bitterness in his voice that chilled Severus to his core. "'Shoes, Cory,''" he imitated, in a sneering, whiny imitation of his son.
Cordelia backed up, colliding with her brother. She found her way around him, into the kitchen, and kicked one shoe off, letting it fall on the mat next to Severus'. The other one was stuck; she reached down and yanked it off with her hands, getting mud all over her fingers, then stripped off her wet socks and put them on top of her shoes. She stayed by the kitchen door, watching her brother apprehensively; he seemed as rooted to his spot as she had been moments before, only instead of looking at Tobias, he was staring down at the worn rug.
She stood in the kitchen in her bare feet, looked longingly out at the pouring rain; they should have just stayed at the playground.
"Where is she?" Tobias asked his son, though he didn't pause for an answer. "It doesn't take that long to remove your trainers, does it?"
Cordelia's teeth clamped down on her lip again, and she slunk back into the sitting room, drawing up beside Severus.
"We... we were going to go upstairs and play," Severus said, hating the way his voice sounded - wispy, whiny.
"Then go play," Tobias said shortly, waving a hand towards the stairs on the other side of his chair. When neither of the children moved, he snorted impatiently. "Go play," he repeated, sneering at his son down the length of his hooked nose. "Your sister will be right up."
There was a sinister, slippery way to the way he said 'sister'. Foreboding filled Severus, and something - fear, rage perhaps - pushed at the inside of Severus' skin, making him tingle all over.
Still, he knew better than to deliberately disobey his father. He cast Cordelia a sorrowful look, crossed the sitting room. He started, blanching, when he passed Tobias' chair and thought he saw the man move. Tobias chuckled. Severus ran the last step, jumped up onto the first stair. He scrambled halfway up the staircase, then slapped his palms on the next couple of stairs, trying to make it sound like he had gone all the way up.
"Come here," Tobias said, crooking his finger at Cordelia. She stepped forward, just one step; hovered in place in case she needed to change direction quickly.
"I said come here," Tobias growled, shifting in his chair; before he rose, Cordelia scurried forward. Leaning forward, the last of his whiskey still sloshing around in the glass he held in his left hand, he reached his right out, took hold of the first bit of the little girl that he could reach - her wrist.
He dragged her the last step; she stumbled, righting herself at the last second. Still gripping her wrist, he pulled her close, staring into her face. She could smell the sour stench of the whiskey, saw the little hairs poking out of his nose. She felt suddenly like she might retch, but knew that she mustn't...
"Not my nose," he said, making a show of looking her over. "Not my brow. Not my chin. Definitely not my eyes." he chuckled, as if sharing a joke with the child. "Those aren't your mother's eyes either, duckling. So...where do we suppose you got them?"
In the stairwell, Severus bit down on his knuckles to keep from making any noise; this was bad. This was very, very bad. Where was their mother?
"Do you have any ideas?" he had gotten very quiet; Severus could barely hear him.
"M... maybe one of my grandparents had blue eyes," Cordelia stammered; her heart pounded so fiercely that it beat along the whole of her body; she felt as if all of her skin was pulsing with it. "My teacher... my teacher s-says there are..." and here was the worst moment in her life, she thought, to forget the right word for something.
"Says there are what?" His fingers around her wrist were crushing; tears filled her eyes, slid down her cheeks.
"S-she says there are... recess... things," Cordelia finished lamely.
Recessive traits, Severus thought from his perch, but of course he couldn't say anything to help her. Instead, he mentally willed the words to find their way into his father's head; now, he thought, was when he could use some of his sporadic magic.
Tobias grunted. "That's what I thought too, but I asked your mother to show me some pictures. I saw a lot of faces in that photo album, ducky, but would you believe it? Not a one with blue eyes."
He released his hold on her wrist, lifted his glass, and sucked down the rest of his whiskey. A solitary bit of half-melted ice clinked against the glass as he set it down on the floor next to his chair. Cordelia took a half-step backwards.
"Yes," Tobias hissed, eyes narrowing, and then he slammed his fist on the arm of the chair, bellowed.
"Yes, girl, back away from me. Me, who keeps you fed, who gives you a bed to sleep in, who buys your clothes, those sodding shoes you just used to trail mud all over my house! Tell me, girl, are you afraid of me? When I've only given you a home, a life? Are you?"
Severus screwed his eyes shut, praying fervently that his sister would answer correctly; she was given to honesty at the most inopportune times.
"N... no, sir." she whispered, swallowed. "I-I mean, yes, sir. I don't... I don't know, sir." Tears slid down her face; she didn't know what answer he wanted; only knew that she wanted, desperately to be able to get away from him, before that sour brown liquid he had been drinking loosed the reins on his temper.
"Well, then. You're not very bright, are you?"
"I don't know."
Tobias threw his head back, laughed darkly, mirthlessly. After a moment, his hand snaked forward again, gripped the little girl's chin in his fingers tightly, pulling her face close to his.
"That's the thing, isn't it, little ducky? You don't know. And me, I don't know where you got those eyes from. Only thing I do know is, if I find out that your mother's been carrying on with some blue-eyed bloke, and making me raise his brat, I'll give the both of you a reason to be afraid of me."
He smiled humorlessly then, showing small, yellowed teeth. "Now go play with your brother." He released her chin, pushing backwards as he did so, so that Cordelia lost her footing, landing on the rough, threadbare rug on her hands and knees. The stairwell was right in front of her; without bothering to stand, she scrambled up the first few stairs, only righting herself partway up, when she stumbled into her brother, again.
Silently, Severus gripped her hand and tugged; both children's feet clattered on the wooden steps, down the hall. Severus reached up, yanking on the cord that pulled down the attic stairs, and he motioned his sister up, climbing the rickety stairs behind her. When they reached the top, he pulled the stairs up behind him, grabbing the cord in his other hand and tucking the end of it into the crack between the stairwell opening and the floor of Cordelia's room, so that the stairs could only be opened from the inside.
#
School started again, and Severus couldn't focus - he held a buzzing awareness that it would be his last year in Muggle school, before he could leave Spinner's End and his parents behind for the whole school year. In light of the things his mother had told him he'd learn at Hogwarts - potions-brewing, spell casting, flying on broomsticks - it was hard to muster enough energy to learn long division, or memorize the periodic table of the elements.
He and Cordelia were at the same school this year, but he and Lily were not. There were two junior schools in town; one at the run-down end, which he and his sister attended, and a posher one at the other end of town, shared with neighboring suburbs, where Lily and Tuney went. He found his mind oft-wandering, as he gazed out of the classroom windows, to thoughts of Lily. Sometimes, they would play together after school, but unlike Severus, Lily did care about her Muggle school marks, and she was doing homework a lot of afternoons - or at least, that's what she told him when he rapped at her door after school.
He did see her at the weekends sometimes, though. Sometimes Tuney came with her, but sometimes he had her all to himself.
One Saturday, when his mother was moping around the house after another row, and neither Severus or Cordelia felt like they could stand the quiet misery inside the four walls of the house on Spinner's End, he took her to the playground. Approaching, he saw a familiar red head standing at the top of the slide, and he hesitated, glancing down at Cordelia; she was already running towards the slide.
"Hello!" she called, not slowing down until she stood at the bottom. "You're my brother's friend! What's your name?"
Lily flashed a smile, dropped herself down the slide. When she got to the bottom, she stood and looked over the smaller girl's head, took in Severus with his now-familiar smock of a shirt, his loose overcoat.
"My name is Lily," she said, and then, "Sev," she called, cocking her head in Severus' direction, "You never said your sister was almost our age. I thought she was really small, the way you talk about her."
"She is small," Severus said scornfully, drawing up behind his sister, "She's only just nine."
Cordelia's tangled hair fanned out as her head whipped around to face her brother. "I'm not that little! I'll start H- I'm... not that much smaller than you," she caught herself just in time. remembering that her and her brother weren't alone.
"You were going to say Hogwarts," Lily said, "weren't you? Are you a... a witch, too?"
Cordelia's blue eyes grew wide. "Sev, you told her? Dad's going to-"
"Cordelia!" Severus hissed, blanching. His eyes roved from his sister to Lily, and back. "Shh," he calmed himself, with effort. "It's okay, Cor. She's a witch, too. But don't go yelling about it."
"Are you going to Hogwarts next year with Severus?" Cordelia asked eagerly.
Lily nodded. "I think so. I mean, I haven't gotten the letter yet, but your brother says I will, when I'm eleven."
"On your birthday," Cordelia confirmed, as though she had a source besides Severus and their mother, "I'm going to stay awake all night and all day on my eleventh birthday, so I can see the owl coming."
Lily laughed, and then offered Cordelia her hand. "Come on. Let's go see who can swing the highest."
#
The air was chill with fall's arrival. Severus and Cordelia met outside the front doors of the primary school; his hands swung free at his sides; Cordelia's arms were loaded with schoolbooks.
Severus reached out, took most of his sister's books. "D'you really need to bring all of these home?"
"It's Friday," she said, shifting her grip on the two books Severus had left her to carry. They started walking in the direction of their house. "I have homework, and besides, I want something to read at the weekend."
"You're going to read your maths book?" he craned his neck, looked at the spines on the books he was carrying for her.
"I like to read the word problems," she said, matter-of-factly.
Severus smirked. "Since when do you like maths problems? Remember last year, when you started crying in the middle of your exam last year, and the school nurse made me come sit with you until you stopped blubbering?"
"That's different," Cordelia sniffed.
"I had no idea why they pulled me out of class, then I get in to the nurse's office and you look like someone died so I asked you what was wrong, and you said - I remember exactly, because it was so hard not to laugh - you said, 'long division is my turtle enemy'. I couldn't even tell you it was 'mortal', you'd have gone spare."
"You knew what I meant," she muttered, cheeks going a very faint shade of pink."And anyway, I don't do the problems, I just like to read them - you know, 'Sally has five pounds to buy chocolate, which costs sixty pence per bar, how much chocolate can she buy?' I don't care how much chocolate she can buy, I want to know what she needs that much chocolate for."
"And you get all that from your maths book?"
Cordelia shrugged, and he could tell her mind was going somewhere else already. There was something in the tilt of her chin that gave it away to him - he could usually see the shift in her eyes, too. Sometimes, it was just the way her mind worked, but sometimes it was an escape tactic, when she was scared, or hurt.
"All right, Cor?" he asked gently, "I'm only playing. you know."
"Sev, how come you didn't want Lily to meet me?"
"I dunno. Sometimes you say things you shouldn't."
"Like what?"
"Well, you almost started talking about Hogwarts in front of Lily, and you didn't know she was a witch yet."
Cordelia frowned. "But now it's fine to talk to her about Hogwarts, and you still never let me play with you."
"There's other stuff, too." he shifted uncomfortably, glancing down at her. "Y'know, things with Mum and Dad, and... I dunno. Forget it."
"I don't like having to stay at home by myself with them. I'd rather go to the playground with you."
"I know, Cor," he said, strained. Petulance played at the corners of his mouth. "But I do take you there all the time, and I give you all my old books and things, and I let you hang around in my room all the time. I share things with you all the time, and I just want... I just want my own friend."
"But you'll have Hogwarts all to yourself next year," Cordelia said, and he could hear the hurt in her voice. "And I'll just be stuck at home being yelled at, and hiding in my stupid room."
"You'll be going soon enough, and I'll show you everything about the castle, okay? And I'll help you with your classes if you need it. Ah c'mon, Cory. Don't cry."
"I'm not," she sniffed, as a fat tear rolled down her cheek.
They drew up in front of their house, and Severus groped in his pocket for the key, balancing his sister's schoolbooks on his other arm. He pushed the door open and Cordelia stormed past him; turned back, and grabbed the rest of her books from his arms. Clutching the whole stack of them to her chest, she ran up the stairs, and he heard the books thunk down on the floor of the hallway.
He followed her, saw the books stacked on the floor while she stretched up on her tiptoes, reaching for the cord that would pull the stairs to her room down.
"Hey," Severus stepped up beside her, and pulled her into a hug. "Just because I have another friend doesn't mean we aren't still friends, too. You're my sister, we're always gonna stick together, at home and at Hogwarts. Okay?"
Cordelia nodded, wiping her hand across her eyes. "Okay."
Severus reached up; he was a few inches taller than her, so he could reach the cord more easily. He pulled the staircase down. "Go do your homework, and I'll take you to the playground tomorrow."
"Even if Lily is there, too?"
Severus nodded. "No more crying though, or the deal's off, right?"
She gave him a wobbly smile, bent down to pick up her books, and returned his nod. "Thanks, Severus."
He watched her climb into her room, dumping her books on floor beside the stair-hole, then he ducked into his own bedroom, easing the door closed.
"Girls," he muttered peevishly, kicking his shoes off the end of his bed as he settled into it. He snatched Hogwarts, A History off his night-table, and curled up to read it until supper.