Chapter Text
Spinner’s End was cold, even in August. The fire hadn’t been lit in weeks, he didn’t see the point. Severus lay sprawled on the lumpy sofa, shirt half-unbuttoned, a half-empty bottle of firewhisky on the floor beside him, and a stinging scratch on his neck left by someone he couldn’t even name. Blonde, maybe. Or brunette. It hadn’t mattered. It never did.
He didn’t sleep well after. Never did. He used to. He used to sleep like the dead with her curled around him, soft limbs tangled, her breath warming his neck, her fingernails ghosting his chest until he forgot he was anything but hers. But that was a lifetime ago.
Fifth year: they’d hidden everything. The secret kisses, the quiet moans stifled in dark corridors, the way she whispered “Sev…” like it meant everything, like he meant something. And then the word. One word. It broke her. Broke them.
And then sixth year came, and it was a different kind of madness. She hated him. And still, still, they fucked like they were punishing each other. Anger and guilt tangled in sheets behind silencing charms, in empty classrooms, in the back of the library where no one dared go. She stopped calling him Sev.
Seventh year, she walked away. For good this time. No more secrets. No more hate. Just silence. Then James bloody Potter and his shining teeth, his loud laugh, his hands on her hips where Severus used to hold her like she’d fall apart if he didn’t, and she looked happy. He’d hated her for that, once. For choosing James. For leaving. But now? Now he hated himself more for ever thinking he was someone who could be chosen.
Ten years. Ten years and he still remembered the way she tasted when she bit down on his shoulder to keep quiet. The way she used to trace his ribs after. The way she cried the last time, and he didn’t stop her. He just let her go. He drank.
He flooed to Knockturn when he couldn’t stand the silence anymore. Slept with witches who never stayed the night. Woke up alone, every time. No one asked his real name. No one touched him like they meant it. Sometimes he dreamed about her. Not the sex, not the bruised lips or fingernails or gasping in cupboards, but the soft mornings, the way she smiled sleepily, kissed his temple like he was hers.
Those mornings were rare, but they’d existed. For a moment. He dreamed about her hands on his face, cupping him like he was fragile and good, and the way she once whispered, “You’re not a monster, Severus.”
That was the worst part, because she’d been wrong. The monsters win. They survive, but they don’t live and he was still here. She probably had a lovely house now. A garden. A husband who made her laugh. Maybe a son with messy black hair and her eyes. A child she kissed on the forehead while Severus sat in this rotting house with empty bottles and memories that smelled like her shampoo.
He didn’t even have a photograph. He thought once about writing her. Just once. To say he was sorry. To say he never stopped thinking about her, that he didn’t sleep anymore, that the world felt colder without her in it. But she wouldn’t want that. She’d made her choice. She deserved her peace. He picked up the bottle, then set it down again. His hand trembled.
No one knew what they’d been. What they’d done. Not really. Not even Potter. Not even her husband. No one knew how her fingers used to cling to his arm when she came, or how she once begged him not to die. No one knew that in a thousand lifetimes, she’d still be the only person who ever touched his soul. And she would never know that he still loved her.
He pulled a blanket over his shoulders and leaned back into the creaking sofa, staring at the ceiling. Somewhere, Lily Evans was alive.
The house was quiet again. Harry had gone to bed at exactly eight. He never put up a fight, he was a sweet boy, her sweet boy, and Merlin, she loved him with a ferocity that sometimes frightened her. But the silence that followed bedtime stretched unbearably long. James was out. Again. Something about Sirius, and the Cannons, and some pub that had half-off pints on Wednesdays. She didn’t ask anymore. She just kissed his cheek and told him to have fun.
Then she sat on the couch alone, with a cup of tea she didn’t want, and stared out the window. Sometimes she listened to the wireless. Sometimes she picked up a book and read the same sentence over and over without taking in a word. Sometimes she just sat, alone with the hum of her thoughts. And that was the worst part. Because in the quiet, her mind wandered back to the one thing she never let herself talk about. The one thing she could never say out loud. Severus.
She didn’t even know who he was anymore. It had been ten years. Ten whole years since she saw his face. Since she looked into those eyes that had once known her so completely she sometimes wondered if a part of her had lived inside him. She wondered if he thought of her. But it didn’t matter. Not really. That door had closed.
James thought he’d been her first. He was sweet about it, nervous and earnest and proud, and she had smiled and nodded and said all the right things. But the truth was… James hadn’t been her first. If they were counting times and not people, he hadn’t even been her two hundredth.
It was Severus. Always Severus. From the first trembling time they’d touched under their tree, through stolen nights and silencing charms and the war they waged on each other with every kiss. He knew her body like a hymn. She could still feel the ghosts of his hands if she thought too long.
She told herself it hadn’t meant anything, sixth year. That she was just using him. That it was just sex. But that was a lie. She hadn’t fooled anyone. Least of all herself. She still loved him. Even then. And it killed her to walk away.
He never begged her to stay, but he looked at her like something inside him was dying. And maybe it had. Maybe she killed it. But he’d killed something in her too when he said that word, when he chose pride over her. They were both bleeding. Just in different directions. She married James instead and she didn’t regret Harry. She would never regret Harry.
But there were nights like this, cold and still, when she thought about that other life, the one where Severus never said it, never broke her, never let the darkness take him. Where they were older now, maybe wiser, and still in love. What would it have looked like? Would he have made tea for her in the mornings, quietly humming while she slept in? Would he have kissed her forehead instead of running off to the pub? Would he have told her she was brilliant when she brewed a perfect Pepperup? Would he have wanted her still?
She didn’t even know where he lived now. What he looked like. If he was happy. If he was alive. They hadn’t spoken since the end of seventh year and yet she still thought about him more often than she dared admit. The world knew nothing. No one did. Not about the afternoons tangled in sheets. Not about the way she once told him she loved him with tears in her eyes. Not about the bruises on her hips that weren’t hate at all, but desperate devotion in disguise.
He was a stranger now, but once, he’d been hers. She stared down at her tea and realized her hands were shaking. She missed him. Not in the way she missed her childhood or the freedom of youth, but in a marrow-deep, aching way that pulsed under every quiet moment of her life now. She missed him. The way he looked at her like she was something holy. The way he used to whisper her name like it meant salvation.