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It's a hot summer, one that makes your skin tingle in direct sunlight and feels like you're being baked alive inside. Well, in Severus's room, at least. He's decided to hide out indoors today, he can't handle having another sunburn this summer, his shoulders peeled for a week and his skin was so painful that he's vowed never to go outside without sunscreen again. Lily can yell at him from the back garden all she wants, he isn't going out into that heat.
“Sev! Sev I know you're in there!”
Speak of the devil.
“SE-VER-US! I know you hear me! Do not make me come bang on your door!”
That made him move. He sat up and threw open the window beside his bed and stuck his head out, eyebrows scrunched together and an angry frown at the ready before he noted Lily wearing a big floppy hat, and a soft blue dress and staring up at him. He stared for a moment, anger bleeding away into confusion before he shook himself and scrunched his face back up.
“What? It's bloody hot and I'd like to get back to lying in one spot.”
“Pack a bag. Meet back at my place. We’re going on a trip!” Lily said, then turned on her heel and took off down the path and around the house.
“Lil!? Lily! LILIAN!” he called after her, but she just waved a hand.
“We leave in 20 minutes!” She called as she disappeared around the corner.
Severus has never packed for a trip. He had to search the whole house for any sort of bag to carry clothes and toiletries in, to begin with. That had taken ten minutes alone so now he's sitting on his bedroom floor staring at his tiny collection of trousers and shirts and underwear and trying to figure out how long he needs to pack for and where they're going and why in the world is Lily doing this to him on the hottest day of the summer. His brain is fried and he can barely think.
“Severus? Darling?”
“My room, Mum!” He calls out, picking up his mother's old blouse —the creme one with the soft lace at the sleeves— to fold and toss into the old suitcase he found in the basement.
He hears his mother's footsteps, light and hesitant as if she's listening after each one, come up the stairs and stop at his door. When she opens it he glances up and notices how she looks tired but hopeful for some reason.
“You knew about this?” He questions lightly, a hint of curiosity and confusion leaking through the put-on indifference. He hasn't yet figured out how she manages to do that, faking like he's uninterested in what someone says one way or the other. It's always been something he's wanted to emulate ever since he was little and she'd use that voice at the grocery down in town. He used to watch her get better deals or stare down annoying shoppers all because of that voice. The tone of being unaffected. He wishes he was unaffected.
“Yes, the Evans’s came into the shop the other day and asked—”
“Does Appa know?” Severus interrupts, the question bitter and spat out. The question Eileen doesn't want to answer. The question Severus needs to know. If his father knows he will go, reluctantly of course, but he will go. If he doesn't…
“He knows. I've been out getting you clothes. There's downstairs. Not new, of course, just a few pairs of shorts and decent shirts. Some shoes, socks, the like. Your father—”
“Appa. You know he hates that word.”
“Right. Your Appa,” the word sounds off still. Eileen never quite got the hand of the Korean that Severus's father refuses to shift from when he's drunk or angry or spiteful or … worse. “Your Appa wanted me to get them. So you didn't go out and embar—” she stopped, a scarlet blush heating her cheeks. They stared at each other for long moments, Severus with his hands fisted in the soft shirt in his hands, the threads seeming to creek in his grip, and Eileen in slowly dawning horror at what she'd said.
“Severus I—”
“It's fine. Appa does not want me to embarrass him. I understand. Where are the clothes?”
Eileen is silent for a moment, then speaks in a soft, defeated voice, “In the living room. On the table.”
“Understood.” Severus stands, grabbing the handful of shirts and pants and shoes and shoving them back into his drawers, unfolded. He will deal with those later.
He slips out of the room, past his mother who stands frozen in embarrassment and frustration and upset, and heads down to get his semi-new clothes to keep up appearances that his family isn't dirt poor and that his father is a decent man.
He packs them away into his borrowed and battered old suitcase with his mother down the hall in his parent's room and pretends that he doesn't hear her sobbing while his father is still out.
Severus has never been to the sea, never felt the ocean breeze in his hair or his lungs.
He's never felt this… peaceful.
He has felt at peace before, usually in those first few days when his father hadn't come back at night and he and his mother would make pancakes together and listen to the staticy old wireless in the corner. When they would celebrate the calm in the house with dancing and off-key singing to songs they barely knew before the dread set in. Before the realization that Tobias hadn't come home by noon and that one of them would have to go find him.
This peace is different.
This peace is bone-deep.
His father is back in Cokeworth, went and sent him away for a week to spend time with his friend and her family, and his mother is there, probably cleaning the house now that she doesn't have Severus underfoot or tracking dust and debris back in.
This peace, like the ocean air coming in through the car windows, is light and warm and makes him a little giddy with how good it feels. He's so happy, he can even smile and nod along as Petunia rants and raves next to him about some girl from the neighbourhood who looked funny at the boy she liked this week.
“What's in that house?” Severus asks on their second day there on the beach.
The cottage the Evans's is small, barely big enough for the family of four that visit it every summer, apparently, with two growing girls, and yet they have somehow fit all five of them into it comfortably with a little wiggle room.
Lily looks up from the small sand castle —and really it looks more like a very damp sand mound with sticks and leaves in it than a castle— and squints up at Severus then turns her confused squint to the horizon where he's pointing.
“What house?” she asks, and Severus feels a niggling feeling of confusion and dread in his stomach. Those words, uncomfortable and short, fill him with a feeling of being ‘other’ for the first time in a while. He feels strange and outside again and he doesn't like it one bit.
“What do you mean ‘what house?’ The big house on the cliff there. It's massive, Lily!” He replied, his head snapping to her and back of the sprawling castle-like house on the rocky cliff side.
It's beautiful in that sort of way that abandoned homes have. Some of the outside turrets appear to be destroyed, knocked down with weather and time, but the majority of the house seems to pulse with life. Like it's calling out to him to look here! Come here! Come explore! and Severus has never been more conflicted and confused since his first bout of accidental magic.
“I mean,” Lily said, stopping his wandering thoughts and snapping his attention back to her, “that I do not see a house nor a cliff.”
“You don't see it?”
“All I see is the ocean, Severus,” Lily says, going back to her sand castle and trying to make its walls stand up.
Severus looks down at the ground then back up, stepping closer to the water's edge, to the shore, and stares at the castle and the cliff it stands on. He doesn't understand. It's right there.
“You really don't see it?”
“Nope. Maybe you should head inside. The sun seems to be frying that big brain of yours,” he hears Lily say, though she sounds farther away now. He can't really hear her over the crashing waves around his hips.
Why is that?
He looks down, finally noticing that he's stepped further into the water and he's sinking lower as he goes further out, starting to tread water.
Come to me.
Who said that?
Come, Prince child.
Severus is swimming now, and the thing about that is, he taught himself how to in the river running through the town, back when it was clean, and this is a lot different from that. For one, because he can't just stand up in this deep of water. And for two, something has him, pulling him along the water and not relenting even when he tries to pull away and get back to shore.
“Severus?” He hears Lily call out to him, tries to call back to her and only gets a mouthful of salty water that he chokes on.
“Severus come back! You're too far out! Mum said not to go that far!”
He tries again to turn back and call out to Lily but the thing, whatever it is, yanks at him, pulling him under the water. He only gets out a cough and a yell before he's underwater, thrashing and coughing as his lungs begin to fill with water instead of air.
My child.
‘No. Not yours.’ he thinks, flashes of his mother and father crossing his mind in an instant. He thinks of them as the little breath he had bubbled out of him and he truly starts to lose hope.
MY CHILD.
Severus is drowning.
He's going to die, pulled under the water and drug away by some thing that has claimed him. He can hear it clearly, a ringing voice calling him, declaring him a Prince but he's never been class president, let alone royalty, so it doesn't quite make sense.
Prince child… come to me.
Under the water, he thrashes, and tries clawing weakly at whatever has his arm but only finds his own skin there. He finds himself tiring quickly, unable to break free or swim back or anything because his lungs are full and he can't scream.
Come home!
Then he's pulled up and out, and he coughs out great lungfuls of water and he feels the world has been tossed upside down and all which ways around because he's staring up at the sky, clear blue and cloudless and the sun is shining and someone is pressing over and over on his chest. It hurts, gods it hurts, but it's pushing more water past his lips until he bolts up and over, coughing out the remaining water in his lungs and stomach to take in heaving, deep breaths of air that burn worse than the water did.
Lily is crying, tears making her bright green eyes shine like emeralds and he can barely make out the words he knows are falling from her moving lips over the sobs he heads in that same voice, the one he can now turn his head toward and, with a sharp clarity, recognize as the house on the cliff.
My Prince… come home.
Then the world goes black.
When they come home, right on time, the Evans's talk to Severus's parents for a long while.
His mum and dad had come to pick him up at their house, not wanting them to see their barely held-together home, and Severus stood silently a step behind them as they were informed of his “terrifying encounter” at the beach.
The whole rest of the trip, Severus spent his time indoors, ignoring the wailing cries coming from the house on the cliff. He stayed indoors, helping clean, helping prepare meals, reading, and anything but going out to the beach. He had loved it, before, but he couldn't stand to step out onto the sand again, couldn't feel the water on his skin.
When they got home, Severus was sent to his room and as soon as his door closed, the chaos began. The sounds of his parents arguing, softly at first, but quickly gaining volume as they screamed and yelled at each other trying to be heard. In the end, Severus crawled into his bed with no supper and hid away under the meagre blanket his mother had made him while he was gone.
He missed the beach.