FIC: The Day After the Day After (G)
Title: The Day After the Day After
Type: Fic
Age-Range Category: Three
Characters: Severus Snape, Petunia Dursley (née Evans)
Author: phoenix_fancies
Beta(s): auntlynnie
Rating: G
Note(s): Thanks to my amazing Beta and muse! She makes me presentable, as always. Any remaining blunders are mine.
Summary: Severus makes a deal with his childhood enemy.
2 November, 1981
4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging
The sun had set long ago, although it was still early evening. Severus Snape had been waiting all day. He was dressed as a Muggle, which made it easier to go unnoticed. Both wizarding and Muggle modes of fashion were fine by him, not that he would say so to any wizards he knew.
All told, he wished he had never been noticed at all. Every night he fell asleep hoping that he wouldn’t wake in the morning.
No such luck. Decades of being luckless carried him forward toward his target. He did not glide up the walkway with any overt stealth, but he was donned in his typical, unobtrusive preference of black on black. He walked with a measured gait he’d been practicing, hearing his heels click on the pavement of the walk.
His knuckle barely rapped upon the door, but he knew the occupants would hear it.
Inside the house there was squalling, and after the knock, muffled shouts of confusion until a haggard man with spit-up across his shirt, necktie, and shoulder cracked the door open.
"No solicitations," he barked.
"I have come to... help," Severus said, pausing a moment before finishing because he, himself, was as incredulous about his arrival here this evening as the man behind the eyeball that was peeking through the door.
The door closed, and there was a rattling of the chain, and then, the door opened. It was only ajar enough for Severus to slip through, and then it was closed quickly but quietly.
Not quietly enough; the squalling doubled.
Severus shrugged out of his coat, laying it across the arm of a nearby chair.
From the top of the stairs came a hushed scolding, and Severus could see the hem of a housedress, ankles, and tidy shoes.
"Sorry, dear, but this one says he's here to help." Vernon tugged at his tie and unbuttoned his collar.
Without invitation, Severus moved up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, just to the right, was the nursery, plenty large for two babies, but certainly not outfitted as such.
"You," the woman snarled quietly, but it was a hollow threat. The woman was exhausted. The defeat in her shoulders as she bounced a bundled baby suggested a rhinoceros could come through and she would hardly flinch.
"Me." Severus picked up the babe who was in a bassinet on a rocking chair. With a grip that belied his dour appearance, the man held the second babe gently, firmly against his chest.
"They're fed?"
"Twice. I don't know-" the woman said but her voice cracked. “I get one down and the other just starts aga-in.” Her voice cracked as she finished, and tears welled up in her eyes.
The man began to hum. It wasn't a tune in particular but more like a cello, low and smooth, soothing as it caught each baby's attention. As he found a rhythm in his hum, his weight began to shift from side to side.
She matched his action, lulled herself, as much as the boy in her arms was. She watched the babe settle down and give a sleepy yawn.
It took more than a few minutes, but slowly, the two babies gave in, and when Severus and the woman were certain they would not be disturbed, they each put the baby in their arms down to sleep.
The woman was tender as her babe was laid in the cot. She looked impossibly sad as she watched her baby continue to sleep. She pulled her hands back and rested them on the side of the cot.
"I suspect they will stay asleep, and announce if they are not." Severus moved the bassinet to a more secure position than the rocking chair, although it meant the floor, for now.
"I will put a kettle on if you care to freshen up first." He didn't wait for a reply, but turned and went back down the stairs.
~~~~~~~~
Severus moved around the kitchen with a knowledge that suggested he’d been there before. He hadn’t, but he understood how things in a kitchen ought to be organised, and knew that a homemaker such as this would want to be sensible to the point of condescension.
He poured the water from the electric kettle into three mugs, each with a tea bag slotted in. Although he had seen what was obviously the tea for ‘guests,’ he knew better than to use that now. Tea needn’t be fancy to be had, he knew. He preferred the smell of the ‘utilitarian’ stuff, anyway.
Severus had yet to see the husband since coming back downstairs. He hadn’t expected to, but he had hoped. He knew the feeling of too much weight yoked on one’s shoulders. He felt it, even now, even as he had lost everything.
Losing had freed him, in a way. He saw things differently now. Severus wanted to be thorough in this endeavour. This house had been invaded by dark-haired wizards in the last 24-hours. He could only imagine what belligerently plain people such as these might be thinking.
Severus was stirring his tea when, at last, his hostess emerged from upstairs. Although she had not washed her hair, the woman was clearly fresh from a shower, her dressing gown looked as though she had just removed the tags, and her night clothes showed absolutely nothing to make a scandal, from what he could see under her dressing gown.
She sat and had a sip of tea.
Severus cleared his throat. "I watched last night as they left Harry. They didn't know I was here. No one outside of this house knows that I am here. It is my preference that it stay that way." He idly stirred his tea with a spoon, although he had added nothing.
The silence stretched between them.
"When was the last time you saw her?" Severus asked with a less abrasive tone.
"They had a little wedding. None of your kind were there."
"That you know of."
That made the woman scowl. "Still horrible after all these years."
Severus bared his teeth. It was nearly a smile, but it certainly was not friendly.
The woman sighed, warming her hands with her mug. "I knew she’d had a baby, but... I've been so busy with my Dudley."
"Petunia," Severus started, but paused. "What do you know?" This was a tricky bit, and part of why Severus had thought to not come at all.
"The letter said that she and him," disgust laced her voice four a moment. "They were murdered, but that somehow the baby had survived. That he's special."
Severus knew that spiteful tone she had for how "special" Harry Potter was quite well, but he also knew that she didn’t have the first idea.
A baby had stopped the worst, most evil wizard in recent history. A baby!
But, for her, it was more about the past repeating itself. Petunia had known that her sister was "special," too, and that was why they had hardly spoken in many years. There was nothing like envy to drive a wedge between sisters.
He gave a rueful chuckle and drank his tea. "That is, not surprisingly, very much what the Headmaster would say here, I suppose. Never mind that your sister is dead. Never mind that you have your own baby. This baby is special." He took a deep breath.
Leaning forward as though they were sharing secrets, Severus moved just inside her space. Their knees were almost touching, but not quite. "I'm very sorry, Tuney. I'm so sorry. None of this is how it was supposed to be."
She stared at her cup, but he could see one eye looking at him sideways. Begrudgingly, she had to yawn.
Thinking their time was drawing to a close, he asked, "Are you… nursing?" His voice was just above a whisper, and pink stained his cheeks unavoidably.
"Rude!"
"My point," he said between clenched teeth, "is that if you would like to rest, now, I can mind them. I cannot, however, nurse them."
"It would probably be poisoned, anyway," Petunia muttered. She pushed her mug away and put her elbows on the table, covering her face with her hands. "What am I supposed to do? Take him to breast? Lily's needs are still more important than mine, and she's dead! She’s dead because of you!"
Although she had been quiet at the beginning of her reply, as she thought about his question, her temper flared, and soon she was standing in her kitchen, her chair on its back from being knocked behind her as she stood, her voice turning to a screech by the end.
Severus, more gracefully than he realised, stood and pulled her into his arms. He had known there might be a storm if he came. Also, he welcomed the abuse she heaved on him. He was in complete agreement with her.
She started punching his chest with the sides of her fists, an outright tantrum happening as he held her near. Luckily, he had put a spell on the kitchen to keep the house quiet for the boys.
He endured all that she dished out. Years of childhood hurts and fury and sadness expelling all at once.
Still, the husband was nowhere to be found.
Severus let Petunia cry into his chest.
Petunia was the only one who had any idea what her sister had meant to him. Severus and Lily had been close once, but then a wedge had separated them, as well. He wished that he had someone who would help him, but he had only had one person, ever, and now she was gone.
As the crying subsided, Petunia pulled away from him, righting the chair and sitting in it. She refused to meet his gaze until she had finished her tea.
"I am a bit over-tired. You don't mind?"
"Not at all."
Severus finished his cup of tea, as well. Leaving everything for the morning, they went upstairs.
She looked in on the nursery as Severus took his seat in the rocking chair. Her baby was sleeping soundly, and she stroked the hair back from his eyes. She looked, then, at the baby in the bassinet, still dreaming as well.
Her lips pursed.
Severus watched as her temper and panic began to rise again. He reached down, pulling the cover of the bassinette closed. “Get some rest, Tuney."
~~~~~~~
Severus was dozing in the rocking chair, only somewhat stirring when Petunia came in for the midnight feeding, and again shortly before 3:00. He noticed she fed her nephew from a bottle, but she was still careful with him, making sure he was satisfied the whole time.
After each feeding the boys each went straight back to sleep.
Early in the morning, before the husband had risen, while Petunia was out washing her son to get him ready for the day, Severus held Lily's son in one arm, transfiguring the bassinet into a proper cot with a few careful twists of his wand.
It was smaller than his cousin's, plain, but safe and sturdy.
When she saw it, her head dropped just enough to show her resignation.
"I'll see myself out. If you have need of me, send a letter."
"I don't have your address," she said, almost as if he were dull.
"Put it in the post box on the corner with my name on it. I'll get it."
"Fine."
"Keep him safe."
Petunia rolled her eyes. "Fine."
Severus went downstairs and grabbed his coat, walking through the door without a backward glance.
Once the door had clicked shut, he flexed his fingers that had held Lily's son, impossibly light at the same time as he was impossibly heavy.
Severus wasn't sure he'd ever held a baby before Lily's. He had never even really considered children, apart from his own relation to them as peers, or in later years, underlings.
He had tried not to take in the many dark cowlicks that Lily's son had, likely, inherited from his father, or the shape of the ears he knew came from Lily. But, like many times in his life, Severus had been pinned by Lily's eyes as he laid the baby in the cot.
And above them, a lightning scar.
Severus walked to the postbox, making as if he was dropping something in it. Instead, he cast a spell so that he might receive notes from Tuney. Once he was well out of the neighborhood, he slipped down an alleyway, and Disapparated.