TITLE: still a kid
FIRST PUBLISHED: September 4, 2023
SUMMARY: Lily and Severus spend their summers by the river.
oOo
"Still a kid," her parents laugh, and Petunia echoes with something sharp tugging at the corners of her mouth, and so it's all right, for a little longer, that Lily goes out to play every day and doesn't come back till the streetlamps are lit, brightening the grey twilight. Summer is muggy, slows things down; Lily walks barefoot with grass under her toes and in the river's edge, in the mud, with her shoes safely tucked into the gnarled roots of the old oak. She scrapes her knees, gets dirt up to her elbows as she and Severus hunt for flobberworms and lacewing beetles, and she pinches the worms between her fingers until the greenish stuff oozes between her fingers and the bulging things spasm and lie still, and Severus uncorks one of the stoppered glass vials he keeps in his big black coat and she puts the creatures into the glass, and he corks it back up. Petunia would find it horrifying. Even her parents—well, they know she's a witch and they're proud of her. But to them, it means the kind of charms Professor McGonagall showed them when she brought Lily's letter along; precise and clean and mathematical. To her parents being a witch means thick schoolbooks with bright colors, it means the hustle and bustle of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, gilt letters and the sleek red train trailing smoke. Maybe, though, they would not be so horrified by all this—after all, she's still a kid.
Under the hot sun, Lily's skin goes red when she isn't careful; Severus says, "they have potions for that, you know," and Lily laughs.
"Yeah, it's called sunscreen. I'll grab some tomorrow." Sometimes she even remembers.
Severus has careful fingers, hands like a tree branch in winter—stark against the sky, impossible to look away from when they move and shape stories in the air. His fingers are stained brown and green and his nails are dirty, and mosquitoes buzz past until she or he claps their palms around the bloodthirsty little monsters. The midges get into her eyes, and the grass by the canals is tall, and hides them both from everyone and everything, like this is the only place in the world. He smiles, too; even when there are bruises on his wrists; this year he's hit a growth spurt and his trousers sit high above his knobbly ankles. Severus is a wizard, like in all the stories, and she is a witch, and they know how to brush past each other, hands and shoulders bumping together. They don't talk, so much, about Hogwarts like they used to. Its very realness has made it a fragile thing between them, though the shine of it burns so bright she thinks it might overflow with one uncareful word.
In the fall they will pack up all their books and their school robes; Lily's will be new and clean and Severus's will be patched. She will bring a trunk full of the latest spellbooks and he will never ask to share, but keep adding notes to the old books from his mum, which he will say work better—since he knows where everything is, and he's improved upon them. A flare for the dramatic, he signs all his with property of the Half-blood Prince, in case of theft, and Lily signs hers Lily Evans, because she's just a muggleborn, after all, and that's not worth bragging about. Everyone in Gryffindor is nice about it but she's put it together after four years—that she'll never quite know the right things to say at the right time, the spells that James and his friends can perform without even thinking, that they've known since before they went to school—and who the portraits are and what the modern thing to do is and what's too rude, and it doesn't matter, really, because she's bright and special, it's enough.
It is enough, and she won't stop until everyone believes it, even if she can hear sometimes for a muggleborn hanging off the ends of their words, which is almost like the "for a girl" she'd grown up with and therefore knows.
But when October comes she will gather her nice new robes and wash the dirt from her hair, and pull her sweet smile out of the trunk with all her other school things. She will go to the Slug Club and get bragged about and practice all the magic she isn't allowed to do in the muggle world until her charms are as neat and mathematical as anything, and it takes a deft hand. And she won't be a kid then, and neither will Severus, and things will be strained the way they always are once they've spent a few months sitting at different tables across the great hall and she has to hear what his friends say and they way they say it, filth, filth, filthy. At Hogwarts they are not kids at all. He is a Slytherin and a half-blood and when his friends get into it and nudge his arm and crow about oh, did you see Mary, did you see that mudblood, he'll say yeah, yeah I did. What can you expect from a mudblood really. Lily will have clean hands and a bright smile and she will rub shoulders with "the best and brightest of the age," and no one will mention it a bit, not really, and Severus will get hexed in the corridors by James and his friends for some ill-defined reason she's never quite put together, but knows deep down in her bones, recognizes in the way those four look at him, that look in their eyes, filth, filth, filthy in his threadbare robes.
She was born with magic, and she'll fight her way through the world until everyone knows it, until even Petunia comes up with something better than freak, until magic itself, the careful and mathematical movements of her wand, clean and shining, proves it.
Only now, in the summer, the drone of insects in the air, she is still a kid, and she steps through the riverbank, the cool and gentle mud, and takes Sev's hand.