He had always known it would come to this.
All these years, as the Dark Lord steadily gained power, his mother had warned him this day might come. She was pureblood, after all . . . it was inexcusable for her to marry anything less than a pureblood, let alone a Muggle. Whenever his father hit her, he always felt like screaming, "How dare you? How dare you, when you're the very reason her heartbeats are limited?"
He wasn't bothered that his father now lay dead upon the floor; he had endured too much abuse at his hands. Any sympathy he might have had for the man who had fathered him was eclipsed by the fact that his mother was about to join him.
He thought back to when they had gone into hiding, what seemed like an eternity ago but was in reality only four years.
"Poppet," she had said, "we're going to have to go away for a while. For a few years you'll have to come home to a different house for the summer holiday."
"But why?" he had asked. He had noticed an ever-present fear in his mother's face the past few weeks. Whether she was cooking dinner, playing Gobstones with him, teaching him potion-making tricks, or even sleeping, the lines on her face never seemed to go away.
She had taken a moment before answering. "There are probably some . . . people after me. They think it's wrong that I married your father and had you, and if they find us, they'll . . ." She had closed her eyes, and he had noticed tears gathering at the edges of her eyelids.
He had waited, wondering what could possibly be upsetting her so much.
A single tear had trailed down her homely face as she finished, "They'll probably kill me."
Fear had flooded him at these words. "But Mum," he had said in a small voice, "if they don't like you because you married Dad and had me, then won't they . . ." he had found it difficult to say the word, "kill us, too?"
Her eyes had flown open, and her face had grown hard.
"No," she had said, her voice resolute. "No, not if I can help it."
He remembered how he had gone to his room after this revelation, and curled up in his dark closet among his Hogwarts robes and cried. He registered a sort of irony, through the haze of dread, that he was again hiding in his closet, fearful for his mother's life. Although now it wasn't just the remote prospect of her death that frightened him; the sheer inevitability of this event pressed down on him. Knowing that the day they had prepared for, the event that had always frightened him witless when he had even stopped to consider its possibility, was finally here. And this kind of fear was much too acute to be soothed by tears. He hadn't thought of himself as a child in several years, but suddenly he realized that he was no more emotionally developed than he had been on the day his mother had explained to him that, so long as the Dark Lord remained powerful, her time on this earth was limited.
He always knew this was coming, but somehow that didn't make it any easier for him to witness the flash of green light that illuminated the inside of the cramped closet just before he heard the heavy thump outside the door that ushered in the conclusion of his childhood.
A Lot Can Happen In a Summer by liquid_silver
Chapter Notes: A/N: I had a hard time deciding whether to put this under "Alternate Universe" or "Same-Sex Pairings." I eventually decided to put it where it is because although the fact that it is AU is crucial to the plot it is first and foremost a slash fic.