July, 1989
Tobias was looking down at his bed and seeing things, he decided.
Pretending at this worked for keeping his calm for about ten seconds, which was quite a long time really, but honestly it was like looking sixteen years backward in time and that was going to do his head in in short measure.
For Christ’s sake.
He had been back in the country a solid few months. When he’d put his keys in the front door, the house had been quiet and old and very, very much exactly the same as it had been when he had left it some… oh. Hmm. Seven years ago now? Not that he’d stepped too far into this house when he’d been back last time. Too much time with Henry, too much time around shock and grief and seeing other peoples sorrow and despair, where he’d had a hole in him since as long as he could remember that made it so that he just didn’t feel things like that; didn’t work that way. He’d fled after sticking around for only a few months, he could absolutely admit to that much, and he had taken the furthest away job with the least contact possible to back home before anyone could call him out on it.
And now he’d just come off a fourth back-to-back twelve hour shift – he’d slept at the restaurant, in the end, it being easier than pretending he wanted to be doing anything else – and realised it was already July, driven home, marched his very tired, very fifty-two year old body up the stairs looking to finally manage to actually properly sleep and –
Somebody else was in his house, and! Had beaten him into his own bed.
Dark hair covered the pillow – on what he still thought of as her side of the bed at that – while the face beneath was obscured, and a little body was curled up into a lump. The covers were pulled as high as possible without smothering the entire head of hair. One bony finger was evidence of a hand clutching at the pillow in sleep.
It had been fifteen years since Eileen had killed herself.
Tobias hadn’t been in the country then, either.
He undressed, and went to take a cold shower.
So. This was absolutely not on.
By the time he felt clean enough to get ready to sleep, he fully expected the offending head of hair to have run off, because there was no way it ought to have been comfortable where it was.
Tobias pursed his mouth on seeing it still there, in exactly the same place and position as before.
A well of feeling was beginning to make it’s claws known in his chest, and he did not approve of it.
In his pyjamas, feet in the socks he preferred to sleep in, Tobias slid into his bed and gently cosied up to the warm, unconscious body on the far side.
He reached out so that he could wind himself the entire way around the offending torso and pushed his nose into thick murky hair until he found an ear, and said, mindful of the rumbling timbre of his voice,
“You’ve got your own room.”
He waited, feeling a bit mean. But really.
His son jerked awake suddenly, twisting and reaching, Tobias suspected, for that stupid bloody stick he always carried around like it would get anything done for him. A quick glimpse of the whites of his panicked eyes was briefly satisfying, but not so much as manhandling him onto his front, piling on top and holding his flailing arms still underneath.
“No, no,” Tobias chided. “You clearly wanted to sleep here. So go back to sleep.”
There was a minor struggle but really, his child took after his mother to such an extreme that in a physical altercation – even if Tobias hadn’t been, well, Tobias, the kid wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell.
Once his son quieted himself down, Tobias pursed his mouth again at the sudden play-dead attitude he was getting.
Sev had his face hidden in a pillow and was hunching his shoulders up, like it would hide him or something completely pointless and stupid.
Tobias waited a few moments to see if his son would try anything else at all, and sighed when he didn’t.
“Come on then, you fucking baby,” he said, rolling off of Sev’s back but keeping his arms pinned in place. It put him on the wrong pillow, and that was for the best. “Honestly, just go back to sleep.” Tobias settled down behind him, hands around his wrists, arms around his torso. He was so, so thin. He kicked a socked toe into one of Sev’s calves and contemplated, for reasons that clearly indicated he needed a good solid amount of sleep, biting at the hair at the back of his head.
“Dad,” Sev whispered, in a monotone. It sounded like it was a lot of effort to make the sound at all.
“Son,” Tobias returned. He blinked when the word resulted in Sev making a full body flinch.
“Let me up,” he whispered, sounding like he was on the verge of tears.
“No,” Tobias told him, and exhaled deeply, letting his own body relax. “Hush.”
He rubbed his fingertips against the undersides of his twenty nine year old son’s wrists, and fell asleep counting the breaks in the scar tissue. If Sev had started crying before then, well. Pretty standard Sev. Tobias did remember.
Hell of a way to say hello after seven years. But that was them.
The summer of 1989 was dry and hot.
Cokeworth was Cokeworth, and it was nice to be home. The water went off twice, Henry punched him in the face before any one of the Evans family would speak to him again, and Sev kept sleeping in his bed. After a week of this, Tobias decided that he should probably ask someone what the hell was up with his son, because since he’d turned up from Christ knew where all Sev was really doing was sleeping in Tobias’ bed and that was not normal behaviour for a kid his age.
He lazed out in the back garden of the head of the Evans’ home, two streets over from his own house, sunning himself for the second day of his four-days-off week with Pam Evans, Henry Evan’s wife and ersatz mother to the local community.
She was in a two-piece, unconcerned with the increasingly red colour of her skin. Maybe he’d been in Siberia too long to remember the colours people went in sunshine like this. Maybe it was it’s contrast to her frizzy, now completely white, barnet.
“Doesn’t he have a job?” Tobias mused, out loud.
“Toby, for the last time. Why don’t you ask your bloody son?” She queried.
“Because he’s sleeping. Still. Again. I don’t know.”
“Didn’t even know he still lived around here, to be honest,” Henry told him, later in their local, over bad drinks and the same question. “Much less in your fucking house. Never see him. You’d think we didn’t spend ten years putting a roof over his head,” he added, which was a little bit blunter than Tobias had expected, and surprised him.
“You got an issue on that, Hen?” He queried.
“No, our cous.” Henry waved a hand. “It’s just. You know.” He took a deep swig of his pint. “You staying around this time? Because it just sounds like he’s doing what Eileen used to do, but with less screaming at the husband in between bouts.”
Tobias remembered that well.
The crux of the problem had been that he had tried to stay put, in the one place permanently, once she was pregnant – and hadn’t that condition been a shock. But he knew other people that had done it, and they seemed to be coping fine. So baby it was.
It hadn’t really worked out, the whole staying put business. He had been bored as hell, unused to the monotony and the domesticity and all that. She had been the reason they’d moved here in the first place and then her parents had bloody died, left her a wreck and then a wreck with an infant that –
Well.
“She did used to scream at me, didn’t she,” Tobias sighed. “Real set of pipes on that woman.”
“You used to piss her off so much,” Henry reminisced.
“And she was bloody unsociable, too, about as much as he seems,” Tobias griped, then. “What happened, Hen?”
“Life’s a fucker,” Henry shrugged. He was otherwise sitting very still. “You know we’ve still never found out what happened to Lil’s son?”
“Oh fuck me.” Tobias dragged a hand down his face. That one still hurt. Not for himself – for Henry, who lost a son and a daughter in law to drunk driving, and then his granddaughter to some twat from Surrey and estrangement as soon as she married at eighteen, and then his other granddaughter and her baby son to what, exactly, nobody had ever really told them. There was not much so cruel as stealing three generations of children out from under a man.
“So at least he’s in a bed, and you can say that much. Ignore me, I’m obviously on one. Fucking ignore it Toby, do me that.”
“I’m sorry, Henry,” Tobias told him, meaning it to his core.
Henry inclined his head, and finished his drink.
After a lot of nagging, it turned out that Sev was indeed employed. As a teacher. At thatbloody boarding school. In Scotland. Because – well. He didn’t really explain himself at all.
Tobias gave up a bit; left him to it until his son left again in September.
Tobias himself had generally given up on the idea of staying in one place and trying to have a steady life. Somehow, though, after Siberia and that disaster that he really was not going to bother thinking about ever again – it was easier to come back to England and Cokeworth and what with the huge cull in folks he knew or did dirty work for, just get out and do something gratifying.
And so he returned to work as a chef.
After all, that’s what they’d used to call him.
That’s also what he was, but also what he was, and eighty hour weeks and a four hour commute each way because he couldn’t stick to one restaurant, and Cokeworth itself wasn’t exactly a buzzing centre of cuisine and he’d really honestly much rather just work for other people – very on brand for him; point Tobias and say: go. It was the truest he could come to his purpose.
It was what made him perfect fodder for a man like Henry Evans, who did not do much himself at his age but did do a great deal of pointing people and saying go. Even as a younger man, when the Evans kids were small, Tobias had done odd jobs for the family. He’d never expected his own very spontaneous marriage at eighteen years old, and subsequent move to the north midlands, to work out in his favour the way that it had.
He’d have been a miserable father if he’d stayed with the wife and kid constantly, he knew that. He had nothing whatsoever to base the job on, and it didn’t come to him naturally like, for example, violence and precision in all things and pushing the limits of what a human brain could do when it was kept awake and under stress, under stress, under stress – and that wasn’t what fathers were meant to be like. He was well aware that he was all too quick to reach for a belt when the kid wouldn’t behave. Tobias was not built for babysitting.
Fathers were meant to be like Henry, whose three boys had all adored him. They were meant to be like Danny, Henry’s late son, whose second girl had been born less than a month after Sev and was just the same amount of boarding-school-in-Scotland, thank Christ, so that when Tobias was away and Eileen was having a rough time of things, Sev had somewhere to stay with someone who looked like a damn father and all, someone to keep an eye on him and do whatever it was you were meant to do with kids that age to make them grow up and have kids, and not fuck them up too badly.
Only something in his grand plan hadn’t really worked, because his kid – well, Danny’s kid was dead, her kid was Christ knew where, Danny and his wife were both also in the fucking ground and somehow Tobias was still kicking.
It was a wonder Pam and Henry could stand to see his face sometimes, let alone hear him whine about his son’s apparent depressive fits.
So Sev was a teacher at that bloody boarding school. His son also, apparently, had absolutely nothing else going on in his life whatsoever. Tobias was expecting it, then, in the summer of 1990, when Sev showed up after over ten months of absolutely no contact at all, looked at him from a very tired little face, managed to say, “hello,” and summarily dragged himself up the stairs.
Tobias waited a minute and went after him. Sev started, badly, when Tobias grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down the landing to the bathroom, and put himself between Sev and the exit while he managed to run the bath.
“If we’re doing this shit again,” Tobias said, starting in at the buttons of the huge coat thing that his child had on, “and by this shit I mean lying around and sleeping all eight or so weeks you deign to grace Cokeworth with your presence.”
Sev wouldn’t even look at him, was looking blankly at something to the right of his hairline. Tobias got him out of the coat and started in on trying to understand the four layers of shirts and wollen things underneath. “If that’s the plan,” he continued, while Sev stayed on mute, “it’s not the plan,” he explained, “we’re going to say fuck it to that plan.”
He got to bare skin and put the stick and the strap keeping it on his kids arm down on the cistern.
Christ. Even undressing him was a gargantuan chore. Tobias shoved him bodily to sit on the closed lid of the toilet while he started in on his shoes.
“Is that the plan?” He enquired, going at his socks next.
“Why are you even here?” Sev ground out, and Tobias had noticed that his hands were in skinny little fists. Good, finally. Get mad at me, son, he thought, pulling him back up and efficiently divesting him of his trousers. One more stick, strapped to his leg. Off that came, to join it’s friend behind them.
Just a watch remained. That went in the little cupboard above the sink, safely away.
“To get you into the bath, silly,” Tobias mocked, when that was taken care of, manhandling his son’s bare body into the water. Sev acted like he was expecting it to be full of acid. Tobias got down to the same level on the outside, grabbed the jug from under the sink, and dumped water over his child’s head. Then he sat back.
All Sev did was lean forward, bring up his knees, wrap his arms around them and hide his face.
Tobias sat next to him for long enough that he needed to top up the hot water. He dumped water over his hair a couple more times, and then set in and washed it.
Sev didn’t say a word.
“I’m not playing,” is what Tobias eventually got around to letting him know. “You’re unwell.” He paused to give him the chance to respond. Sev, predictably, did not.
“Yes Daddy, you’re quite right,” he affected the accent Sev seemed to have now. Which was, pretty much, smack vaguely into the middle-middle classes or something, and somewhat too ingrained as far as Tobias was concerned.
“Thank you Sev, I am aware of that but I’m glad to hear you agree,” he played the part of himself. “Are you hungry before you fuck yourself off to the bed at two in the afternoon like a lazy twat?”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” he affected being Sev again. “I was going to ask you for some toast or something. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything for about three decades so probably shouldn’t overdo it.”
Finally, a face lifted out of the knee and arm table. Tobias was so pleased that he couldn’t help himself from patting it with a palm, even if it looked as blank as before.
“Can you,” Sev sniffled.
“What?” Tobias encouraged.
“Can you stop touching me. While I’m. In the bloody bath.”
“I absolutely can,” Tobias informed him, making no move to shift away.
“Would you,” Sev snapped at him, then, and Tobias grinned.
“I’m making toast,” he said, “proper cuisine. Get out and get dressed in something that doesn’t look like you’ve fucked on over out of Star Wars yeah?”
Sev nodded. Tobias left him to it, resisting the urge to wrap him up in a towel and sit him on his lap and effectively bully him into laughing, the way he’d done with Eileen when she’d let him.
It was – well. It was probably, really, the fucking hair, of all things, he thought, that messed him up into thinking that way. They looked so similar overall. Sev looked nothing like Tobias. Not a bit. Tobias and his middle-white skin and his mousy brown don’t-notice-me easy-going barnet, his generic as hell face – and six foot four-ish was taller but not that tall, and he was built solid but only in the way that came naturally from being on your feet all day, and not being afforded the luxury of avoiding lifting a lot of heavy things for the majority of your life. Working class to his core, Tobias: Uncomplicated and bland.
Sev and Eileen, though; they were something else, with their ethnicity and their identities screaming out from both of them; unapologetically noticeable human beings in these neatly wrapped little packages that held universes of thoughts and character and feelings. But it was their hair, Tobias thought. It was their hair – the same barnet on both of them – that got him messed up.
Funny, he thought, shoving the bread into the toaster; Sev being the one to modulate his childhood accent. Tobias doing what he did for years (Chef) and keeping the Essex native. Playing up to it half the time, even though he was essentially and respectfully a fucking Brummie at this point. Sev, trying to disguise himself – when he was the one that wouldn’t be able to hide away anywhere.
By the end of that summer, he’d dragged his child to the damned pub and all. Sev was very nearly behaving like a real boy, or some approximation of. Tobias rarely saw him in bed before 9pm, and he chopped things up and read books and seemed interested in something other than lying down and either staring at nothing or hiding his eyes for hours on end.
And he went back to boarding-school-in-Scotland and Tobias worked locals, and realised that he hadn’t felt the urge to flee the country in two whole years, so, maybe. Maybe this might be how they worked, now. Something resembling a routine had been established.
Which is why, when the summer of 1991 came around, Tobias knew that something was somehow very, very fucked.
He couldn’t put his finger on what, exactly, it was, but Sev was wound up and nervy, and it was irritating as hell to be around.
The confidence he’d seemed to gain around other living humans the year previous had melted into discomfort. Dragging him to the pub, even with Henry and half the bloody family there, did nothing but highlight his unsettling mental state.
Tobias was not in the habit of asking his son to share his awful little feelings, but he did think that whatever was going on was bound to be bloody stupid. He resorted to approaching the whole thing much like he had with Eileen when she’d gone quiet and sharp and looked at him like he was going to do something ridiculous like hit her.
He cornered Sev behind the kitchen table and shouted at him, intending the shock and adrenaline of that to shake him out of his mood.
Unlike Eileen, Sev did not appear shocked, shrink back or shake. He just doubled down.
“Oh for buggering fuck’s sakes,” Tobias roared in frustration, while Sev started counter-shouting with his boarding-school-in-Scotland shit and Tobias had to dodge until he could physically remove that stupid stick from Sev’s hands.
Fights were very easy when you wanted to actually hurt someone; fights in the kitchen with family were not. Every attack had to be modulated, but Tobias hated not to remind Sev that relying on a super special magical stick of wood for both offence and defence was absolutely ridiculous, and he ended up having to carefully temper the pressure of a knife at his son’s throat while he pinned him to make his point.
And pin his child he did, until Sev’s own frustration broke and he stopped trying to fight back.
Tobias knew that there was a problem. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it was there.
Severus fucked off to his ten months of gainful employment in September like the two years previous, and Tobias decided to just forget about it for the next year or so and carry on with his life.
And so it went.