Chapter Text
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."
-- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
St. Mungo’s days are always the hardest.
St. Mungo’s days mean Eileen is due for her next treatment which means that the pain is bad, and her skin feels sensitive to the very air around her and she’s so tired that she’s pretty sure she could lay down on the ground and easily fall asleep. In the coming week, she’ll start to feel better, though for the rest of the day after treatment her head will feel fuzzy and her muscles weak. Really, they tell her that she shouldn’t be alone for the rest of today, someone should keep an eye on her, and she lies and says someone will be there. Technically, she could call her son, and she knows he would come. Resentfully, yes, but dutifully.
Eileen already asks too much of Severus, though. Enough that it stings her pride. The money he contributes to maintain her flat since she can’t work and toward the specialist who the Ministry doesn’t cover as part of their free public health plan. He’ll be by in a few days anyway, with the potions that she needs which he insists on brewing rather than having her pay for the “swill that the hospital peddles.” He would complain about the state of the flat, walking through and casting cleaning charms as he went, and they would argue about whether he should hire a cleaning service for her. She would tell him that the house elves that those agencies owned were treated terribly and often made sick by not being part of one stable magical household. He would scoff at her sentimentality.
And just as quickly as he arrived, he would disappear back to Spinner’s End, until the following month more often than not.
She should get home but there’s no food there. Eileen needs to plan better for the week she has to go to the hospital. She always means to but then the symptoms start to come back, and it falls to the wayside. A quick stop at the grocery store and then she would go home and get some sleep. Just picking up the essentials, Eileen eyes the checkout line that is longer than she’d like so she decides to pop into the restroom. She would use the loo really quick and maybe splash some water on her face to wake up more.
As she pushes the door open, she’s startled by the scene playing out in front of her. There’s a woman, thin and every line of her body taut with anger, leaning over a small boy who had a tear-streaked face but didn’t make a peep. The woman has him by a fistful of black hair and is hissing venomously, “How dare you embarrass us in front of Marge! Do you want her to know what a freak you are? Do you think she’ll be as tolerant of it as we are? Do you think anyone else would put up with it?”
The scene gives Eileen an unpleasant jolt and the urge to turn around and walk back out. But she recognizes this woman, she’s sure of it, so she steps further into the restroom. The woman still hasn’t noticed her, hasn’t even turned around, but she’s so sure she’s seen her before . . . “Petunia? Petunia Evans? What do you think you’re doing?”
The woman jumps at the sound of her name, spins around with a look of horror that is mildly satisfying, though she hasn’t let go of the boy’s hair who gets dragged along. He winces but still doesn’t make a noise of protest. Eileen can tell that Petunia is trying to place her, and she can tell when she does. The woman’s face relaxes slightly, lip curling into a sneer, and she recognizes that look well. It’s a look she’s received all of her life from middle class women, usually when she was serving them their meals or cleaning their houses. It was a look that said, ‘You don’t matter, your opinion doesn’t matter, your existence is irrelevant.’ Eileen feels like telling her that her face will freeze like that if she wasn’t careful as she had once done when she was a teen.
“What are you doing here? I wouldn’t think one of your kind would be in a place like this.”
Eileen raises a terribly unimpressed eyebrow at this. As if she hadn’t shopped at the same stores as the girl’s parents in Cokeworth since before she was born. “By ‘my kind’, I assume you’re also referring to your sister’s kind.”
Because the picture is growing a little clearer for Eileen now. It’s one she’s painfully familiar with, and she takes a closer look at the boy. He’s looking at her curiously now, big green eyes still glassy from tears but keen, and for the first time since she entered the restroom, he looks like he wants to say something. He doesn’t, though, and her eyes trail over his appearance. He’s too thin, with clothes that don’t fit and a bit of dirt on his face, and she thinks she glimpses a bruise when his too large sleeve slips up his arm.
Petunia has finally let go of the child’s hair but immediately grabs his arm instead. She snaps, “For all the good it did her.”
Eileen ignores her, eyeing the child speculatively, “Is that Harry Potter?”
It seems impossible but here he is being manhandled by his Muggle aunt in the restroom of a grocery store. She sees the famous scar and there’s no mistaking those green eyes. Poor Lily. She remembers reading about what happened to her - in a salaciously detailed description of the aftermath featured in The Daily Prophet, complete with a photo of the destroyed house - and remembered thinking her death encompassed everything that war had been. Senseless violence and wasted potential.
The woman bristles and starts to respond when a voice calls from outside of the bathroom, “Petunia, what are you doing in there? We’ve got to get going if we want to get back in time for me to feed the dogs their supper. They don’t like to be kept waiting.”
At the sudden booming sound of the woman’s voice, a look of fear overcame the child’s face and to Eileen’s surprise a patch of wet appeared on his pants. Her heart seized with pity, and she took a hesitant step forward, her instincts making her want to comfort him. Petunia reacted first, however, jerking his arm and saying shrilly, “Disgusting boy! Let’s go! Now!”
The boy looks mortified in a way that Eileen thinks no child should for having an accident when they’re afraid. As Petunia tries to pass her, Eileen goes to grab her arm, “Wait, you can’t just treat him –”
But Petunia pulls away, hissing furiously, “I will not have you lecture me about parenting. Especially from someone whose son grew up to be one of them. He was, wasn’t he? With the people who killed her? You don’t know what it’s like for me and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Eileen can’t help it, she flinches at the words, and Petunia takes the opportunity to push past her. She does so roughly enough that she bumps into Eileen who stumbles a bit in her weakened state. By time she steadies herself and pushes open the restroom door, she sees Petunia already rushing out the front door with her family. The boy cranes his head around to catch one last glimpse of her before they disappear into the car park.
Eileen pays for her groceries, hands shaking so bad that she drops her coins, much to the annoyance of the cashier. By the time she gets home, she is feeling breathless and flushed, sure signs of a panic attack. She hasn’t had one in a long time and barely remembers that she can’t take a calming draught so soon after treatment. Instead, she sinks into the kitchen chair, abandoning her groceries on the counter, and tries to do the breathing exercises that the therapist she saw for all of one month recommended. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. At first, her breath hitches on each attempt but eventually smooths out and the panic very slowly recedes, leaving her more exhausted than ever.
Then the guilt comes. She should have done more, should have . . . what? Called the Muggle authorities? She had a deep distaste for the incompetence and insensitivity she had witnessed among police officers and care workers throughout her life. Personal experience told her that nothing good usually came from their involvement. It wasn’t like the ministry even had an equivalent to Muggle family services and while she hadn’t kept up on ministry policies, in her day the department of magical law enforcement had always been deeply reluctant to get involved in family matters.
Still, as she slowly puts away the groceries and even as she crawls into bed, the events of that afternoon play through her mind and when she closes her eyes, she sees those bright green eyes, miserable and curious all at once.